Human remains were found Wednesday evening in the young people's neighborhood of Kfar Aza and taken for identification at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Part of a skull was found in the kibbutz, and authorities are examining whether it belongs to Nirel Zini, a Givati officer and resident of the neighborhood who was decapitated during the Hamas massacre on October 7 and whose head has not been located since.
On Oct. 10, 2015, two and a half weeks before his 23rd birthday, Zini, then an Givati officer in the IDF, was critically wounded during an operational activity in Hebron. But that did not stop him. Even before he had recovered from the injury, after one of his soldiers was stabbed in an attack in Jerusalem, he fled the hospital and returned to IDF service.
He served as a platoon commander in Givati, deputy company commander in the Bardelas Battalion, later as commander of the auxiliary company and commander of the mobility company in the Paran Brigade mobility company. Eventually, after 10 years of service and because of the severe injury he had carried since 2015, he was forced to end his service with the rank of major.
Since his 2015 injury, Zini held a thanksgiving meal every October 10. On that same date in 2023, he had planned to propose to his partner, Niv Raviv, whom he had met in the army eight years earlier and with whom he lived in Kfar Aza. But just three days earlier, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists carried out their massacre in Israel.
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Amir Zini, father of the late Nirel Zini who was murdered in Kfar Aza
(Photo: Gadi Cabello)
At 10:04 a.m., Nirel still managed to send a message to his family. “I’ll update, they’re here. I’m putting down the phone, pray,” he wrote, while holding a knife in one hand and the door of the safe room in the other. His partner Niv was hiding under the bed.
When the terrorists stormed the home, Nirel decided to try to distract them. He tried to escape the house, which had already begun to burn, drawing their attention in the hope that his partner would survive the inferno. In the end, both were murdered. Only six days later, after they had been listed as missing, the families were informed that their bodies had been found.
But at Nirel’s funeral, the Zini family’s ordeal began. Before he was buried, relatives were not given the opportunity to identify him, and they were told it was better that way because of the condition of the body. Given the state of the burned home, the family decided not to insist, despite a “very strange gut feeling,” as Nirel’s father, Amir Zini, described it.
Months later, the family was summoned to Israel Police’s Lahav 433 unit to hear findings from the investigation. They asked to see photos from the scene or anything that could help them understand what happened to Nirel that morning. Instead, they were shown only footage of the body bag being opened at Shura Camp, the IDF base to which bodies of victims were taken to identification. That’s when they discovered that Nirel had been decapitated by the terrorists.
Until that horrifying moment, not when they were told he had been killed, not at the funeral, and not in any official briefing, the family had no idea what had actually happened to their son.
“No one prepared us for this or considered our right, as his parents, to be informed of such a critical and horrific detail before the burial or at any point afterward,” his father wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he hopes reached him. “The gravity of this is doubled by the fact that this information was not shared by anyone except Lahav 433, not the Shin Bet, not the police, not the military.”
And if that weren’t enough, the family also came to understand that no agency was actively searching for their son’s missing head. Over the past two years, and even before the most recent hostage deal, Nirel’s father contacted officials handling captive return efforts, requesting that his son be classified as a deceased hostage whose remains were abducted to Gaza. The response he received was: “We can’t add another hostage to the list.”
The ordeal — and the letter to Netanyahu
After learning the full extent of what happened to Nirel, the Zini family began their own search. They located the exact spot in Kfar Aza’s Young Generation neighborhood where Nirel’s body had been recovered, met with the soldier who reported the site, and consulted with representatives from the IDF’s Gaza Division rabbinate.
Since then, with help from volunteers from the Israel Antiquities Authority and the IDF’s missing persons unit, they have spent countless hours combing the rubble in search of Nirel’s head.
“I had to stop working. My children stopped working. We had to bring in heavy equipment, set up nets, sift through debris,” described the father. “All this while appealing to every authority in the country for help. Needless to say, no one stepped up.”
The family forwarded hundreds of bone fragments and other findings to the National Center for Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv in the hope of recovering evidence about their son’s final moments. Some were identified as animal remains, while others, hundreds of human bones and skull fragments, were deemed too degraded for DNA extraction.
“These are hundreds of bones, some quite large,” Amir said. “It took eight months to get results, and when we asked to send the remains abroad to labs that might succeed in extracting DNA, we were denied.”
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Amir Zini in Kfar Aza, at the scene where his son Nirel Zini and Niv Raviv were murdered
(Photo: Gadi Cabello)
In a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Amir Zini listed several “deeply troubling” findings uncovered during the family’s investigation, including revelations by ynet and its parent newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that two shipping containers remain at Shura Camp, holding roughly 350 body bags containing unidentified human remains.
Among other things, the father wrote that “an independent committee of ministry directors general called the ‘Attribution Committee’ decided on its own around October 7 not to inform any family about the condition of their loved one’s body at burial. That same committee also decided that if human remains were found, the families would not be updated on the matter.”
The father stressed that “the failure must be corrected,” and in his appeal to the prime minister asked him “to act to correct the terrible injustice caused to us — first in the failure to protect our son, then in burying him without his head and without our knowledge, knowingly, while such a heavy decision was taken for us without us being asked or informed, and a third time in the agony of the searches we have been going through for almost two years, while no official is willing to take responsibility, help, mobilize or show us that the state also cares about this.”
He asked Netanyahu to meet and concluded: “Before it is too late — fix what is broken. Please. Our souls know no rest. Please help us reach the peace we so badly need.”
Now, nearly three years after the massacre, the Zini family will have to wait for the Institute of Forensic Medicine’s examination to determine whether the skull fragment found does indeed belong to the late Nirel.