IDF Staff Sgt. Aviv Levi, 21, was killed Friday night while on patrol along the Gaza border. His girlfriend, Shahar Erez, eulogized him in a heart-wrenching post on Facebook and Instagram. A short while later, after her posts went viral and her identity became public, Arab users on both platforms flooded her pages with abusive messages and expressions of joy over Levi's death.
In her post, Erez, wrote of a fearless young man with whom she was planning a future.
"My dearest love, my fighter. The heart burns and the tears won't stop. Who would have thought you'd be gone so quickly?" she wrote.
"You were never scared, no matter what was in front of you. My Aviv, we had a million plans ahead of us and we were counting the days until we'd be together again. Your birthday is in two weeks and while I was making plans for a perfect celebration, everything exploded.
"I refuse to believe this is real. I refuse to believe you are gone," she wrote.
While hundreds of Israelis rushed to post messages of condolences and encouragement, dozens of Arab users did the opposite.
Repugnant comments, such as, "We sent your boyfriend to hell," "Gaza is waiting for you. It will be your graveyard," and worse, were just a small portion of the dozens of vitriolic messages in Hebrew and Arabic posted to her accounts. Over 50 such comments were posted within two hours.
Israelis online were horrified by the nature of the comments and confronted the Arab harassers, some of them tagging the Israel Police and others reporting the comments to Facebook in the hopes that the social media giant would understand the severity of the posts and remove them and the respective profiles.
Shortly after the comments were posted, Erez's eulogy was also removed.
Before it was deleted it had gone viral and thousands of people expressed their support and condolences over her immense loss. As of Sunday morning, it was unclear whether her post was removed due to the abusive comments that followed or for other reasons.
