The Men Who Bring Them Home
Dovi Safier
Yasar Darom is the IDF unit that spent more than two years making sure every deceased hostage had a proper burial. This week, they finally completed their sacred mission.
IDF soldiers pay tribute to St.-Sgt.-Maj. Ran Gvili, the last remaining hostage in Gaza, whose remains were recovered on Jan. 26, 2026 / IDF Spokesperson Unit
The moment I saw the photograph, I understood what it meant. No caption was necessary.
The body on the stretcher was Ran Gvili—the last missing soldier, the final name in a chapter that an entire country had been desperate to close. He was draped in an Israeli flag, surrounded by men in uniform. Relief and grief arrived together, the way they always do in these moments. He was no longer missing. He was no longer a question that kept families awake at night. He was home.
And then something strange happened. Time folded in on itself, and I was no longer looking at the present.
Suddenly, it was November 2023. A small shul on Moshav Shokeda, not far from the Gaza border. Men in uniform. The smell of sleeplessness and something else I couldn’t name. I had come looking for a way to help. I found something else entirely.
A few weeks after Oct. 7, a friend and I flew to Israel. We did what so many people did in those early, disorienting days: We visited wounded soldiers and then made our way to the amputee ward, where we distributed gifts, sang with the men, laughed with them, and cried together as we listened to their stories. Young men who had lost their limbs but not their spirit. Brave men who had given pieces of themselves so that others could remain whole.
We hit the road and drove across Judea and Samaria, handing out supplies at checkpoints: endless cartons of cigarettes, snacks, whatever small comforts we could carry. Soldiers who looked barely old enough to shave, standing guard over a land that suddenly felt more fragile than any of us had imagined.
Since Oct. 7, Yasar Darom have been everywhere. They have recovered hundreds of bodies—soldiers and civilians alike, sometimes piece by piece, often under fire.
We attended shiva after shiva, sliding into chairs that never grew comfortable, learning quickly that we were not strangers among the mourners. We were brothers. And when they asked where we had come from, we found one simple phrase that opened every door and unlocked every heart: Banu me’America. Banu le’hishtatef itchem b’tza’ar.
We came from America. We came to share in your grief.
It was only on our last day that we were granted permission to head south. By then, much of the area remained a closed military zone. The kibbutzim that had become killing fields. The Nova site, still littered with the belongings of those who had fled: shoes without owners, phones that would never ring again, a thousand small objects that had outlived the hands that held them.
A friend who had made the arrangements urged us to visit a very specific unit operating near the border. She thought perhaps we could help them in some way.
“Leave Jerusalem long before dawn,” she told us. “You’ll want to arrive in time to daven shacharis with them.”
We barely slept that night. The roads were dark and empty, and we drove in silence through a country that felt as if it was still holding its breath. The hills of Judea gave way to the flat expanse of the Negev, and I thought of all the journeys we Jews had made through darkness toward uncertain dawns.
When we arrived at the shul on Moshav Shokeda, the first pale light was breaking over the fields. The moshav itself had been miraculously spared, but it sat directly beside Be’eri—ground that had absorbed loss beyond imagination, beyond tears, beyond the capacity of language to hold.
We were greeted there by my friend’s brother-in-law, Boaz. The shul and an adjoining recreation center had become a makeshift headquarters. Men in uniforms milled about, yarmulkes of every stripe and color on their heads, sleeping bags rolled up in corners. Their faces looked young until you met their eyes and saw something far older looking back at you.
This was Yasar Darom.
The unit was born from tragedy. In May of 2004, two armored personnel carriers were blown up on the Philadelphi Route in Gaza, killing 13 soldiers and scattering their remains across the sand. Fellow soldiers were forced to sift through the debris on hands and knees, collecting body parts while cameras captured images that shocked the nation.
In the aftermath, the IDF recognized the need for specialized units to handle such work with professionalism and dignity. Yasar Darom was established under the office of the Chief Military Rabbinate, with a mission both sacred and strategic: to ensure that every fallen soldier receives a proper kevurah—buried with a name, with dignity, with a grave that a family can visit—and to deny the enemy any opportunity to use Israeli remains as bargaining chips or propaganda tools.
Since Oct. 7, Yasar Darom has been everywhere. In the burned homes of the Gaza border communities, where entire families were erased in minutes. At the Nova site, sifting through the wreckage of a music festival that had become a killing field—where young people who had come to dance beneath the desert stars instead met monsters at dawn. In open fields and bomb shelters and safe rooms that had not been safe at all. Inside Gaza itself, in territory that wanted them dead for the act of reclaiming the dead.
They have recovered hundreds of bodies—soldiers and civilians alike—sometimes days later, sometimes weeks, sometimes piece by piece, often under fire. No one was abandoned; no one forgotten.
We prayed shacharis, the morning prayer, with the men of Yasar Darom that morning in the little shul on the moshav.
It was an ordinary prayer service at first. The familiar rhythm of the words, the quiet shuffle of men finding their places, the low murmur of words spoken almost automatically by people who had been saying them their entire lives.
But then, my friend Reuven, a Kohen, stepped forward to the front of the shul. As he covered his head with his tallis, the chazzan’s voice, which had been steady until that moment, began to waver. Not from weakness. From weight.
And then came Birchas Kohanim, the priestly blessing.
As Reuven began to melodiously recite the ancient words, something in the room gave way. I looked around and realized, with a shock that I can still feel in my bones, that every single person in that room was crying. Soldiers who had walked through horrors I could not imagine. Men who had held what remained of other men in their hands. Weeping like children.
I did not understand. Not yet.
And then it landed.
To do what Yasar Darom does—to recover the fallen, to crawl through wreckage and open graves and sift through debris—you cannot be a Kohen, because Kohanim, members of the ancient tribe that once served in the Temple, cannot, according to Jewish law, be exposed to dead bodies. And exposure to dead bodies is a constant and unavoidable part of the work of Yasar Darom, which means that since the war began, through all those weeks of retrieval and recovery, these men had not once heard Birchas Kohanim. Not once. Something that had been part of the daily rhythm of their lives—a blessing so familiar it had perhaps faded into routine—had been taken from them precisely when they needed it most. They had given up this gift so that they could perform the ultimate chesed, the ultimate kindness that asks nothing in return.
And now, suddenly, unexpectedly, here it was. A Kohen standing before them, hands raised beneath a tallis, blessing them. Men whose days were spent bringing home the dead so that other Jews could be buried with names, with the dignity that Jewish law demands we afford to everyone.
Yevarechecha Hashem v’yishmerecha. May Hashem bless you and protect you.
I have never forgotten that shacharis. I don’t think I ever will.
We soon returned home to the United States, but we went back to Israel a few weeks later and checked in again with Boaz. He described how the team had been brought into the basement of a Gaza hospital that Hamas had converted into military infrastructure. Military intelligence directed them to a room in a subbasement where dozens of large construction sacks awaited, each one filled with what appeared to be dirt and debris. Each one had to be opened. Each one had to be sifted through by hand—slowly, methodically, carefully. They were looking for anything that might belong to someone who had not yet been found.
A fragment of bone. A scrap of fabric. Something no larger than a coin.
There is no way to rush that work. It cannot be done quickly, and it cannot be done carelessly. One missed detail means someone is still not home. One fragment overlooked means a family that will never know, a grave that will remain empty, a name that will never be spoken at a funeral.
They searched the same piles again and again. Piles that had already been gone through once were gone through a second time, and then a third. Because “already searched” is not the same as “fully searched,” and these men understood the difference.
And the work paid off. Three days later, back on the base, they crowded around an 11-inch tablet and watched a funeral. Somewhere in Israel, a family stood beside a grave, finally able to say Kaddish, finally able to begin the impossible work of mourning. No one at that funeral knew how this miraculous recovery had occurred. No one, of course, aside from these holy men who watched in silence, their eyes wet, their lips moving in prayers no one else could hear.
Not every day was spent in the field. The unit, consisting mainly of yeshiva graduates, numbed their pain with studying Talmud and other Jewish texts. For more than two years, they carried this weight. And still they kept going.
And then came the morning, earlier this week, of finding Ran Gvili.
IDF soldiers singing after the recovery of Ran Gvili.
The song they are singing is Ani Ma’amin (“I Believe”):
“I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah.
Even though he may tarry, nonetheless I will wait for him.”It has been over 800 days. Our faith may have… pic.twitter.com/bc9R7047ra
— Amit Segal (@AmitSegal) January 26, 2026
The soldier at the head of the procession that carried Ran Gvili’s flag-draped coffin out of Gaza was Boaz. A few days earlier, he and his men had received reliable intelligence that the remains of Ran Gvili—the last hostage, the final name—were likely buried in a grave in a Gaza cemetery. One grave among thousands. Ironically, two miles from the border with Israel, close enough to see home.
But nothing in Gaza is simple. The Alexandroni Brigade secured the area. Fear of booby-trapped coffins required that the elite Yahalom engineering unit examine each grave before it could be opened. A massive team of 20 dentists as well as doctors and medical examiners joined Yasar Darom. On Thursday, Operation Lev Amitz—Brave Heart—began.
Word of the operation leaked to the press. The whole country held its breath.
They dug through graves, one after another. Opened them. Tested remains against dental records. Again and again and again, with no guarantee that any of it would yield results. After nearly four days, things looked bleak. The men were exhausted. The earth had given up nothing.
Until it did.
They found him—843 days after his body had been dragged into Gaza.
We watched from thousands of miles away as they escorted the coffin out of Gaza. Kaddish was recited. And then, spontaneously, the soldiers began to sing Ani Maamin, Hebrew for “I believe.”
A few hours later, Boaz, a reservist who has spent more than 600 days in service since Oct. 7, sent a video message to the unit and their families back home. He was standing somewhere in the ruins of Gaza, still in uniform.
“We made history,” he said. “From the 7th of October until today. The last fallen soldier. By our hands.”
His voice kept breaking.
“Please pass this on to your wives. To your families. This is all for them. This is all for you.”
To learn more about Yasar Darom, or to support its operation, click here: https://www.jgive.com/new/en/usd/donation-targets/123627
Dovi Safier is an award-winning writer whose work focuses on modern Jewish history. A business professional active in Jewish communal life, he lives in Lawrence, New York, with his wife and six children.
Zawartość publikowanych artykułów i materiałów nie reprezentuje poglądów ani opinii Reunion’68,
ani też webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyraźnie zaznaczone.
Twoje uwagi, linki, własne artykuły lub wiadomości prześlij na adres:
webmaster@reunion68.com
