On October 10, 2015, just two and a half weeks before his 23rd birthday, Givati Brigade officer Nirel Zini was critically wounded during an operational mission in Hebron. But the injury didn’t stop him. Before he had even fully recovered, he fled the hospital to return to IDF service after one of his soldiers was stabbed in a terror attack in Jerusalem.
Zini served as a platoon commander in Givati, deputy company commander in the Bardelas Battalion, commander of the Reconnaissance Company and later as commander of the Paran Brigade mobility company. After 10 years of military service, he was ultimately forced to retire with the rank of major due to the severe injury that had followed him since 2015.
Since the day of his injury, Zini had held a thanksgiving meal every year on October 10. In 2023, he planned to mark that day by proposing to his longtime partner, Niv Raviv, whom he had met in the army eight years earlier. But just three days before the planned proposal, on October 7, 2023, Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel, and the couple was murdered in their home in the Young Generation neighborhood of Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
At 10:04 a.m. that day, Nirel managed to send one last message to his family: "I’ll update, they’re here. I’m putting the phone down, pray," he wrote, holding a knife in one hand and the door of the safe room in the other. Niv hid under the bed. When the terrorists stormed the house, Nirel tried to distract them, attempting to flee the burning building and draw their attention in the hope of saving her. Both were killed. Their bodies were only discovered six days later; until then, they had been listed as missing.
But for the Zini family, the ordeal was just beginning. At Nirel's funeral, the family was not given the opportunity to identify his body. Officials explained it would be better not to, due to the condition of the remains. Given the burned state of the house, the family chose not to insist, despite what Amir Zini, Nirel’s father, describes as a "very strange gut feeling."
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.”
Family demands accountability, truth and a grave to mourn
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.”
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.
The letter also cited a government panel known as the “Attribution Committee,” composed of ministry directors-general, which—according to Zini—decided on its own in the aftermath of October 7 not to inform families of the condition of their loved ones’ remains at the time of burial. The same committee, he added, also resolved that families would not be notified if additional body parts were later found.
“It wasn’t enough that our beloved son was taken from us in such a tragic, horrific failure, after serving his country for a decade as a decorated Givati officer and later one of the founders of the Bardelas Battalion, until he was forced to leave the IDF due to a severe injury,” Amir wrote. “Another failure occurred during his burial, when we were knowingly kept in the dark about his decapitation. For two years now, no state body has provided support, acknowledgment or help with the trauma we’re still living through.
"Not only has no one done what is expected in such circumstances, but we’re being passed from one authority to another. Everyone shirks responsibility. The IDF says the police are handling it; the police say the investigation is closed, whatever that means, and the Shin Bet says it doesn’t deal with civilians. So who, in God’s name, is supposed to search for my child’s head?”
He urged authorities to use intelligence assets in Gaza to determine whether his son’s head is being held by Hamas, to resume searches in Kfar Aza with official support and to appoint a designated authority to oversee the case. “This is a critical moment, and our last chance to bring our son to a full burial,” Amir pleaded. “As far as we’re concerned, our son has not been buried; we will search until we find his head.”
Calling the failure “in need of correction,” Amir asked Netanyahu to take personal action to rectify what he called “a triple injustice”: the initial failure to protect Nirel, the burial without informing the family of his decapitation and two years of bureaucratic obstacles and indifference.
He closed his letter with a request for a meeting: “Before it’s too late, fix what is broken. Please. Our souls are without rest. Help us reach the peace we so desperately need.”
Before his murder, Nirel worked in the family carpentry business and was preparing to begin law school. His dream was to advocate for soldiers wounded in body or spirit during military service. He was 31 years old when he was killed. Nirel grew up in Moshav Tlamim and is survived by his parents, Amir and Osnat, and his siblings Matan, Uri and Noam.