Gilad Nehemya Nitzan

Staff Sgt. Gilad Nehemya Nitzan, z"l, 21, served as a soldier in the Givati Brigade’s reconnaissance unit, from Shilo. He fell in battle in the Gaza Strip, a kilometer from Shifa Hospital when a group of terrorists emerged from one of the tunnels and opened fire, killing Gilad, Yehuda Cohen, and another soldier from his unit, Yonadav Levinstein z"l. 

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."
Source: Yisrael HaYom