A boy on a visit to a museum in Israel accidentally knocked over a 3,500-year-old jar, shattering the relic. 

“There are instances where display items are intentionally damaged, and such cases are treated with great severity, including involving the police,” Lihi Laszlo of the Hecht Museum told the BBC. 

“In this case, however, this was not the situation,” Laszlo said. “The jar was accidentally damaged by a young child visiting the museum, and the response will be accordingly.”

The jar dated to the Bronze Age, between 2200 and 1500 B.C. — predating the time of Kings David and Solomon — and it was totally intact, making it a rare find and valuable artifact. Experts have speculated that the jar likely carried local supplies, such as wine and olive oil.

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The museum, located in Haifa, had put the piece on display near the entrance and without protection to show a piece “without obstructions.”

The boy had pulled on the jar to find out what was inside, and that caused it to fall over, shattering to pieces. The museum immediately appointed a specialist in conservation to restore the jar, which will return to its place near the front entrance once completed.

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The 3,500-year-old jar was accidentally smashed by a reported 4-year-old boy visiting the Hecht Museum last Friday. (Hecht Museum)

The museum insisted that the piece will also return without obstructions. 

Israeli museums are no stranger to incidents that destroy priceless works: An American tourist allegedly smashed a sculpture in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in October last year. 

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The Hecht Museum did not place the 3,500-year-old jar behind glass, believing there is a “special charm” to showing historical finds without obstructions. (Hecht Museum)

The tourist allegedly destroyed a pair of Roman statues dating from the 2nd Century because they were “against the Torah.” His lawyer, however, denied that he had acted out of “religious fanaticism.” 

One statue depicted Athena, daughter of Zeus, and the other depicted a griffin grasping the wheel of fate of the Roman god Nemesis, according to The Times of Israel.

Police arrested the tourist at the scene, identifying him only as a 40-year-old Jewish American tourist. 

WASHINGTON (AP) — People who volunteer to donate a kidney face an even lower risk of death from the operation than doctors have long thought, researchers reported Wednesday.

The study tracked 30 years of living kidney donation and found that by 2022, fewer than 1 of every 10,000 donors died within three months of the surgery. Transplant centers have been using older data – citing a risk of 3 deaths per 10,000 living donors – in counseling donors about potentially deadly surgical complications.

“The last decade has become a lot more safe in the operating room for living donors,” said Dr. Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at NYU Langone Health. He co-authored the study published in the journal JAMA.

Newer surgical techniques are the key reason, said Segev, calling for guideline updates to reflect those safety improvements – and maybe increase interest in living donation.

He often finds transplant recipients more worried about potential risks to their donors than the would-be donors themselves.

“For them, this is even more reassuring to allow their friends or family to donate on their behalf,” Segev said.

Thousands of people die each year waiting for an organ transplant. It’s possible for living donors to give a one of their two kidneys or part of a liver, the only organ that regenerates.

With nearly 90,000 people on the U.S. list for a kidney transplant, finding a living donor not only shortens the yearslong wait — those organs also tend to survive longer than ones from deceased donors.

Yet last year, just 6,290 of the nation’s more than 27,000 kidney transplants came from living donors, the most since before the pandemic. Safety isn’t the only barrier to living donation. So is awareness, as many patients are reluctant to ask. And while the recipient’s insurance covers medical bills, some donors face expenses such as travel or lost wages as they recover.

The NYU team analyzed U.S. records of more than 164,000 living kidney donations from 1993 through 2022 and found 36 post-surgical deaths. Most at risk were male donors and those with a history of high blood pressure.

Only five of those deaths occurred since 2013. That period coincided with U.S. transplant centers switching to minimally invasive kidney removal as well as adopting a better way to stop renal artery bleeding, Segev said.

“Over time, it’s a safe operation that’s become even safer,” important for would-be donors to know, said Dr. Amit Tevar of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who wasn’t involved in the study.

But there are long-term risks to consider, too, he stressed — including whether a donor’s remaining kidney is expected to last the rest of their life.

The risk of a donor later experiencing kidney failure also is small and depends on such factors as obesity, high blood pressure, smoking and family history of kidney disease. Risk calculators help doctors determine a potential donor’s likelihood of later-in-life trouble, and transplant centers may have slightly different eligibility criteria.

“There’s no such thing as a moderate- or high-risk donor — either you’re perfect or you’re not,” is how Tevar puts the decision to accept or turn away a potential donor.

Doctors once thought young adults were the ideal living donor. But Segev said there’s a shift toward more older living donors because it’s easier to correctly predict that they won’t outlive their remaining kidney.

If a living donor later experiences kidney failure, they get priority for a transplant, he noted.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.