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.