Last Friday night, the Nitzan family invited for Shabbat dinner soldiers posted to beef up security in the community of Shiloh in the Binyamin region. Fifteen minutes before Shabbat, Yaakov, the father of the family, saw a group of soldiers gathered outside the house. "I wonder why they are early," he asked himself and opened the door to let them in.
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Only when they entered did he realize that these were soldiers he had never wanted to see. "Who is it?" he asked. His son Gilad was serving in Gaza, his son-in-law had been mobilized for reserve duty in the north.
"It's Gilad," came the answer. Instinctively, perhaps in an attempt to deny the bitter news, Yaakov told the soldiers to leave the house. "I want Yehudit to hear it together with me. We do everything together. We will do this together as well," he told the soldiers.
Between receiving the bitter news of the death of their son and his funeral on Saturday night the family went through a shabbat that was incredibly difficult, yet also strengthened them in a way.
Gilad Nitzan was 21 years old when he fell in battle with terrorists in the heart of Gaza City, a kilometer from Shifa Hospital. The soldiers told Yehudit and Yaakov that Gilad had been part of a forward squad that advanced through the alleyways of Gaza City together with the company commander, Yehuda Cohen, and another soldier from his unit, Yonadav Levinstein. They had checked that the alley was free of terrorists, but a group emerged from one of the tunnels and opened fire on the three. They were killed instantly and another soldier was wounded. The other soldiers in the force continued fighting and eliminated the attackers.
I look at photos of Gilad; there isn't one in which he doesn't have a great big smile over his face. "He was all heart. He loved everyone; he embraced everyone; he was friends with everyone," says Yaakov.
After graduating high school and before being drafted into the Givati Brigade reconnaissance unit, Gilad studied at the Kfar Tapuach yeshiva. It was from there that Gilad headed south on the morning of Simchat Torah on October 7 after news of the Hamas assault emerged. Last Tuesday, the family came to visit him on the Gaza border, shortly before his unit entered the Strip. That was their last meeting.
Yehudit relates how, after the mopping up operations in the Gaza envelope and ahead of the ground incursion, Gilad told them about everything that he had been through. "He told his elder sister, who is a social worker, that he would need psychological help after everything he saw in the kibbutzim. He said, however, that it hadn't weakened him and that now he was focused on the mission ahead."
Yaakov added that Gilad had told another sister who is studying to become a doctor that "after everything he had seen, he knew anatomy better than she did."
As we speak, an unfamiliar figure sits down behind the grieving father. The man is Gideon Bugala, the father of a fallen soldier, Adir Ishato Bugala, who served in the Golani brigade and was apparently killed in the initial Hamas attack while on guard duty at the gate of the Nahal Oz base. His father searched for him across the Gaza envelope until the bitter news arrived three days later. Once he had finished sitting shiva for his son, Bugala went from family to family, comforting those who had just joined the circle of bereavement.
"Bloodshed follows upon bloodshed," says Yaakov Nitzan, quoting from the Book of Hosea and embracing Bugala at length. We are all in a tub together. Before the war, we all stuck on our side of the tub and said to the other – to the right-winger, to the leftist, the religious, to the secular, 'don't touch me, I don't want anything to do with you.' Someone up there saw this and stirred us all together. We all took a blow. What a blow. We are all one people."
"The fact that he didn't die in vain, but to save others, gives us some meaning. He didn't just die for us, but for all the People of Israel, which now mourns him," adds Gilad's mother, Yehudit. "And he dies whole, beautiful, even with his peot. The army rabbinate told us that he had been killed from only one bullet that entered at his hip and exited through his heart."
"That is Gilad," says Yaakov. "Everything with him is heart."
"One story follows another; the visitors come and go, among them those who never even knew the fallen soldiers or his family. They simply felt they had to come.
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