Second Lieutenant Pedaya Mark was killed this week in combat by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip while serving as an officer in the Givati Brigade.
By Mindy Rubenstein, World Israel News
Seven years after his father, Rabbi Michael Mark, was killed in a terror attack in the Hebron Hills, Pedaya Mark has fallen in the line of duty in Gaza.
“We were always taught to go to combat service in the IDF, but after [my father’s] murderous attack I felt that I understood how important it is,” Mark told Maariv in an interview in 2022.
The Mark family was ambushed by terrorists in 2016, and more than 20 bullet holes were found in their car, according to the IDF.
Rabbi Michael Mark, a father and yeshiva dean, died, and his wife and children were seriously injured.
Mark was the cousin of former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, and had lived in the Hebron area with his family for years.
The attack came a day after a 13-year-old girl was killed in her home near Hebron.
“We must understand that we are in a state of all-out war and act accordingly,” Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz said at the time. “We must declare a state of emergency.”
After the attack, Pedaya Mark, then 15, told reporters, “They shot at us from my sister’s side, she was sitting to my left. And then dad suddenly stopped moving, and the car overturned.”
Pedaya said Palestinian passersby helped the surviving family members escape the vehicle.
“Arabs succeeded in opening the door and took us out and put us in [another] car so that nothing will happen to us,” he shared in a Channel 2 interview after the accident.
Michael Mark’s nephew, Elhanan Kalmanson, said at the time, “Miki (Michael) said more than once that in these cases [of terror victims] we always see that…the best of the best are chosen. How right he was. There was no one better than Miki.”
In honor of her fallen brother, Pedaya’s sister, Orit Mark Ettinger, wrote the following poem:
Padushka, my beloved brother
The small but the big one
A man among five daughters – adoring sisters
Survived the attack
Givati patrol because that’s Pedaya
Fought to be an officer
and fell bravely in battle together with his soldiers in Gaza.
And the heart, what about it?
Abba (Father), Shlomi, Elhanan – everyone is greeted there by Padushka
And us?
We are left empty and lacking
I have no words anymore
‘Earth, don’t cover your blood.’
(Based on Job 16:18, “Earth, don’t cover my blood, and let my cry have no resting-place.”)
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