‘Is he alive?’: Bereaved families recall the moment they learned their sons were gone

The wounds will never heal On the eve of Simchat Torah, Lt. Yoav Malayev had his hands full. Four tanks from the IDF’s 77th Battalion deployed along the Gaza border had developed computer-system failures. During the day, Yoav and his soldiers repaired two of them. After Shabbat eve dinner, he decided to head back out and fix the remaining two. “One of his soldiers asked him, ‘Why now? It can wait until Sunday,’” recalled his father, Alex. “Yoav replied, ‘You never know what will happen tomorrow morning.’ They worked until 2 a.m., replaced the faulty computers and returned the tanks to operational readiness.” A few hours later, at 6:29 a.m., his words took on devastating meaning. “People ask me whether Yoav sensed that something big was about to happen. I don’t think so,” Alex said. “But he was always meticulous about readiness and operational capability.” “Yoav was the duty officer that morning. When the rocket fire from Gaza began, he remained calm, ordered two soldiers to guard the entrances to a roadside shelter where headquarters personnel had gathered and reassured a female soldier who was panicking. He told her, ‘You should be proud of those tanks you repaired with me. Do you know what four more tanks on the border mean right now? What kind of power that gives us?’” About 30 terrorists stormed Camp Yiftah, which housed, among other units, the headquarters of the 7th Armored Brigade’s 77th Battalion. A small group of soldiers led by Yoav, the battalion’s deputy communications officer, fought them at the entrance and prevented the base from being overrun. Six soldiers were killed there: Lt. Yoav Malayev, Staff Sgt. Ido Harush, Staff Sgt. Yoval Ben Yakov, Sgt. Nathanel Young, Sgt. Ilay Bar Sadeh and Cpl. Naama Bonny. During the subsequent rescue effort, evacuation of the wounded and clearing of the base, three more soldiers were killed: battalion intelligence officer Lt. Sahar Tal, religious affairs NCO Staff Sgt. Orel Moshe and Maj. Aryeh Ziering, a company commander in the IDF’s Oketz canine unit who had arrived with reinforcements. Yoav’s last message “In the last message Yoav sent us, he wrote, ‘I’m in the protected area and there’s purple rain over us,’” said Alex, a retired IDF colonel who had previously commanded the Merkava tank production facility. “At first we thought he had been inside the shelter and was shot there. Then, on Sunday afternoon, the battalion communications officer called and said, ‘It is important to me that you know your son was a hero of Israel.’” Three weeks after his death, Yoav’s parents received the notebook that had been in his pocket. Wounded and bleeding, his handwriting unsteady, he had written one final message: “The best 20 minutes of my life. We crawled all the way here. I’ve been wounded and there’s another barrage now. Thinking of you, and I’ll think of you throughout the journey. I love you.” Seventeen officers and soldiers from the 77th Battalion were killed on Oct. 7. Six of their bodies were taken into Gaza. The battalion had once stopped Syrian forces in the Valley of Tears during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Its soldiers would continue fighting on October 7 and throughout the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. On April 6, 2026, Sgt. Idan Fooks was killed in southern Lebanon by an explosive Hezbollah drone. His partner, Yuval, an IDF lookout serving in the sector, witnessed the incident in real time. Idan’s mother, Meital, a kindergarten teacher, was at work when she received the news. The head of the local education department asked her to come to his office. “I was sitting there when the door opened and two female officers and another officer walked in,” she recalled during a meeting with Malayev’s parents. “I told them, ‘You have the wrong room.’ But they just stood there. “I said, ‘Just tell me how he was wounded and what condition he’s in.’ Then one of the officers came over, held my hand and said that terrible sentence. “I collapsed. After a while, I told her, ‘There must have been some confusion, but I forgive you. Check again and you’ll see it’s a mistake.’ She kept repeating the same terrible sentence until I understood that it wasn’t a mistake. Idan had fallen.” In the difficult days of shiva, however, Meital found one source of comfort. “When we went downstairs to leave for the funeral, we saw that someone had organized a procession with flags from our building toward the cemetery,” she said. “We never expected so many people. To see the beautiful side of Israel, people who had never known Idan coming to say thank you, to hug us, to help us, it moved me so deeply. Because that was Idan. He was a kid who always did good.” More than a bereaved mother Both Yoav and Idan were the eldest children in their families. Idan is survived by three brothers, Rani, Oz and Raz. Yoav is survived by his sister Talia and brothers Avner and Harel. “At 9 p.m., we were told Yoav had been evacuated to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon,” said his mother, Dr. Maya Cohen-Malayev, head of the educational counseling program at Bar-Ilan University. “We got there within an hour, and at 2 a.m. the hospital director, Prof. Hezi Levy, broke the news to us. “Half an hour later, the commander of the military medical liaison unit sat beside me. She told me she was herself a bereaved sister and described how her mother had screamed at the funeral, asking why God had taken her son instead of her. She asked me not to do to my children what her mother had done to her. “Suddenly I understood that I had a role. I had three other children at home who had just experienced something shattering and needed their mother. I am a bereaved mother, but I am also the mother of bereaved siblings. That is a role in itself. “What that officer said saved me. I will always be Yoav’s mother, until my final day. But understanding that I am not only a bereaved mother gave me meaning and became a compass.” Alex said he initially felt trapped in complete darkness. “When Yoav fell, I understood that I could never bring him back, that nothing could repair what happened,” he said. “And that’s true. But there are still many things we can do. One of our responsibilities as bereaved parents is to improve what we can, in society, education, values and at home. “Yoav and his friends did not stand by, and we try not to stand by either. We try to do good. It helps us try to heal the open wounds.” “Wounds that will never fully heal,” Maya added. Meital nodded. “From the moment Idan fell, my husband Gilad and I took it upon ourselves to commemorate the goodness in him,” she said. “It became our life’s work. And it starts with small things. Every person can do one good deed a day. “You get into an elevator and someone is there smile at them. Say hello to the security guard at the entrance so he doesn’t feel invisible. That is the best way to commemorate those who fell.” ‘Don’t worry, Dad. You’ll have grandchildren from me’ On a scrap of cardboard cut from a cereal box, Maxim Entis wrote what would become one of his final messages. Ahead of his mother Larisa’s birthday on April 2, 2026, Maxsim, a soldier in the Nahal Brigade’s reconnaissance unit, knew he would be serving in Lebanon and unable to come home. He asked his sister Zhenya to buy flowers in his name and gave a friend heading home a note with the message he wanted attached: “Mom, happy birthday to 120. I wish you health, love, happiness and everything good in the world. I love you so, so much, even from Lebanon.” Maxim was killed a day later in an encounter with terrorists. “Maksim was killed on March 30, three days before my wife’s birthday,” his father, Leonid, said. “We were sitting in the mourning tent when suddenly Eddie and Zhenya, his brother and sister, called us outside. “Everyone was standing in a circle around a birthday cake. They wished Larisa a happy birthday and gave her flowers, exactly as Maxim had asked in his letter. He wanted us to keep living. He wanted his mother to be happy.” Larisa and Leonid entered the world of bereavement only months ago. Dvora and Elad Saadon have lived in it for three years. Their eldest son, Staff Sgt. Hallel Saadon, was killed defending the Sufa military post on the morning of Oct. 7. He too served in the Nahal reconnaissance unit. When the two couples met, one question hung over the conversation: Is joy still possible for bereaved parents? “It has to be,” Dvora said. “Three months after Hallel was killed, our fourth son, Sahar, had his bar mitzvah. We debated what to do and ultimately celebrated as planned. We told him, ‘We will rejoice at your bar mitzvah, and we will also cry and talk about Hallel.’ The fact that we keep living well and find joy in our other children gives much more meaning to his sacrifice. “I tell his friends that too. Why did he run forward? To protect you, so that you could keep living, fulfilling yourselves and being happy. Just this month, we attended two weddings of his high school friends. They mentioned Hallel under the chuppah, and it means so much to me to see that he is still part of their lives. They even send us pictures from trips around the world with stickers bearing his image.” “Maxim’s friends do the same,” Larisa said. “They take flags and stickers with them everywhere. When I go to the cemetery, I tell him, ‘Maxim, you’ve already been all over the world.’” A heroic defensive battle Maxim, the son of longtime immigrants from Ukraine, grew up in Bat Yam. Hallel grew up in Elazar and attended the Neve Sharya youth village in the Jordan Valley. “They opened a horse farm there, and Hallel began learning to ride. He fell in love with it,” his mother said. “He competed, learned horse training and became a riding instructor. “After the army, he planned to go to a ranch in Texas, become a real cowboy and then come back to a ranch in the Golan Heights. He was a cowboy at heart.” When he was killed, a cowboy bandanna was found in his pocket. After his death, his family launched a major project to renovate the farm, which is now named Hallel Farm in his memory. Hallel enlisted in the Nahal reconnaissance unit in November 2021 and joined its anti-tank company. In August 2023, the unit began manning the southernmost sector of the Gaza border. “They complained that it was a boring deployment,” Dvora recalled. “‘All we do is guard sand and more sand. Nothing happens.’” On the morning of Oct. 7, dozens of terrorists stormed the Sufa post. Hallel, his team commander and several other soldiers fought to hold them back. Eventually, Hamas Nukhba terrorists managed to penetrate the compound and the soldiers were ordered to barricade themselves inside the dining hall. At about 7:30 a.m., while defending the entrance area, Hallel was killed. Sixteen soldiers from the Nahal reconnaissance unit were killed that day, including its commander, Lt. Col. Yehonatan “Barnash” Tzor, and Hallel’s company commander, Maj. Roey Chapell. “As soon as we heard what was happening on the Gaza border, we called him,” his father, Elad, said. “He didn’t answer. In retrospect, we know he was already dead. On Sunday afternoon, one of the wounded soldiers called and told us Hallel had been killed.” The official military notification team did not reach the Saadon home until Monday. “That friend did us an enormous kindness,” Dvora said. “He spared us another 24 hours of uncertainty.” Hallel is survived by his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, brothers Tamir,