Dr. Eitan Ne’eman was killed in battle on the Gaza border two days after war erupted.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
The widow of a reservist slain two days after the War of Revival began on Oct. 7, 2023, just found out the full story of his heroism — dying with a live Hamas grenade in hand, Israeli media reported Wednesday.
Maj. (res.) Eitan Ne’eman, 45, was a father of seven and a senior physician in Soroka Medical Center’s pediatric intensive care unit.
He was called to duty after 48 hours of treating wounded civilians and soldiers who streamed in their hundreds to the Beer Sheva hospital during and immediately after the Hamas invasion.
More than 3,000 people were injured by the terrorists, who also massacred nearly 1,200 men, women and children, and took 251 as hostages back into the Gaza Strip.
On Monday, Ne’eman’s widow, Yael, participated with her children in the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization’s yearly joint bar and bat mitzvah trip to the Western Wall.
She sat next to a military rabbi, Shraga Dahan, and when she told him whose widow she was, he immediately replied that he had taken care of her husband’s body when it was brought to the Shura IDF base for identification, as all Hamas victims were at the beginning of the war.
Ne’eman was mistakenly placed among civilian bodies brought in from the Gaza border, but Dahan saw that he looked like “a special forces fighter,” he said.
He then revealed a shocking piece of news.
“His hand was clenched, and inside was a grenade,” he told Yael. “A live grenade with the pin removed.”
The rabbi said he immediately cleared the room and called in a bomb squad to safely remove the dangerous object, which hadn’t exploded, it was later found, because it was defective.
When Yael told Eitan’s battalion commander what she had found out, he added the fact that it hadn’t been an IDF grenade.
“Eitan must have caught a grenade that the terrorists threw at him and intended to throw it back,” the commander said. “When you run out of ammunition, you use what you have — the enemy’s weapons. That’s the ultimate courage.”
Yael called the news “a message from Eitan just days after the anniversary of his death — and during our son Yehuda’s bar mitzvah celebration, in the Western Wall tunnels, a place that meant so much to him.”
Her husband had been a dedicated doctor who had treated children from Gaza who came to Israel for medical care the same way he treated Jewish children, she noted.
“Who knows — maybe one of those children was the one who later killed him,” she said.
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