The Yanai family thought the worst had already happened when Dor Yanai was wounded on October 7 while fighting alongside fellow soldiers to defend the Yiftach outpost near Zikim, close to the Gaza border.
“We thought that was the ‘test’ we had been given,” his aunt, Reut Schwartzman, said painfully.
On Thursday morning, the IDF cleared for publication that Dor’s younger sister, Sgt. Rotem Yanai, was killed by an explosive drone on Israel’s northern border.
Dozens of terrorists stormed the Yiftach outpost on October 7. Eight soldiers and officers were killed in the battle, but the post was not captured. Dor, who served as a kind of operations officer for the battalion medical team, later described relentless rocket fire after his unit reached Zikim beach following a patrol in the sector. They returned to the outpost and entered a protected room, but the fire did not stop.
“Time passes, and the shooting doesn’t stop. As soon as I get down from the Ze’ev,” he said, referring to an armored vehicle, “we take bursts of fire, and I feel a strong blow to my right thigh. It turned out I had been hit by a bullet, but I still didn’t understand that I was wounded.”
Despite the leg wound, Dor managed to take cover and continue directing the battle against the terrorists. When his magazine ran out, he glanced at his leg and saw the blood.
The battalion doctor, Lt. Dr. Asar Faraj, decided to move Dor and his teammate Yuval Ben Yaakov back to the protected area in the armored vehicle, while trying to save Ben Yaakov’s life after he was hit by two bullets in the chest. When Faraj realized time was running out, he evacuated the wounded to Barzilai Medical Center and even broke through the locked gate of the outpost with the armored vehicle. Ben Yaakov was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
The news of Rotem’s death brought the family back to those difficult moments when they learned Dor had been wounded.
“We thought the worst had already happened, and yesterday the most terrible thing happened. Rotem was killed by the drone,” her aunt Meital Ansbacher said.
Schwartzman said that “when Dor was wounded at Zikim, he was trying to save a friend who had been wounded. We thought that was the test we had been given.”
She said Rotem was deeply connected to her siblings, and that the family was struggling to absorb the disaster.
“Rotem always projected confidence,” Schwartzman said. “She told her mother, ‘So what if there are drones, Mom, don’t worry.’”
“She was a girl full of life. This came as a huge shock to us,” she added. “She wanted to enjoy life. A month ago, on her mother’s birthday, she wrote to her: ‘I hope I’ll be a mother like you.’ That will never happen now.”
Rotem is the 12th soldier killed since what Israel calls the ceasefire in southern Lebanon, and the 24th soldier killed since the launch of Operation Roaring Lion.
The incident took place Wednesday afternoon. At 2:47 p.m., an alert warning of a drone infiltration sounded in Moshav Shomera in the Western Galilee. Rotem was on her way to a protected area when the drone exploded, killing her.
In the same incident, two reservists from the local emergency squad of nearby Moshav Goren were wounded by another explosive drone after arriving to help following the first strike. One was seriously wounded and the other moderately wounded.
The drones exploded inside a military compound. The IDF said the incident was under investigation and stressed that an alert had been activated in the military area when the drones were identified.