On the morning of the cease-fire between Israel and Iran, 24-year-old model Eliana Sachs lost her mother, Michal Sachs, and her brother, Eitan Sachs, when a missile struck their home in Be'er Sheva. Amid ongoing grief, she is trying to fulfill their dreams and to rebuild herself. Now, she's coming full circle by modeling for a brand her mother loved, hoping to keep their memory alive.
On the night between the tragic deaths of her mother, Michal Sachs, a nail salon owner, and her brother, Cpl. Eitan Sachs, from a direct missile strike on their Be'er Sheva home in June, and the funeral ceremony that followed, Eliana Sachs sat down and wrote two lists.
One listed 20 things she wished to fulfill in their honor, such as traveling to all the countries her 18-year-old brother dreamed of visiting but never got the chance. The second list contained 20 personal traits, 10 inspired by each of them, that she hopes to adopt as part of becoming a “new Eliana.”
"I think they were both much better people than I am; they were very generous," she said in a special interview with Ynet Weekend Magazine, four months after the tragedy.
What would you like people to know and learn from them?
"I want young people at my brother's age to learn how to love this country, despite everything. He loved Israel and loved people. He was a good listener and had a phenomenal ability to connect with anyone, of any age or background. Since he died, dozens of his friends haven’t left my father’s side, which says everything about the kind of person he was.
"My mom was also incredibly social and generous. She spent much of her life helping others - gathering food packages for soldiers, driving them to their bases, and supporting cancer patients after she beat the disease herself. She taught me to seize the moment."
What was the first thing on your list?
"To make my mom proud," she says with a shy smile. "Two months before she died, she sent me a picture with a quote (probably by the philosopher and author Simone de Beauvoir), saying that even if she’s no longer by my side, I should remember that I am strong, smart, and the best. It was a sort of a will.
"I remember texting her in reply: ‘Have you gone nuts? What is this weird message?’ And she just said, ‘Keep it, just in case'."
"My whole life I’ve been a people pleaser: top student, modeling for leading brands, working at a high-tech company. There was never room for what Eliana wanted or thought. And I told myself, 'enough'. The last thing my mom said to me was how hard it was for her to see me constantly trying to please others. So now I’m living out her will."
“My dad mumbled and said in Russian: ‘Eliana, they’re dead’”
On the morning of June 24, Israelis hoped to wake up to a cease-fire between Israel and Iran. The military operation, named Operation Rising Lion, which had begun 12 days earlier with Israeli airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, caused widespread destruction, 31 casualties, and many were physically and emotionally injured.
Just two hours before the cease-fire took effect, a relentless barrage of 22 missiles was launched at Be'er Sheva. One direct hit on a residential complex killed four people: Michal Sachs (50), and her son Eitan (18), his girlfriend, Noa Boguslavsky (18) from Arad, who spent the night there, and their upstairs neighbor Naomi Shaanan (73).
At 5 a.m., Sachs woke up in her Tel Aviv apartment with her partner and their two dogs to the sound of a rocket alert siren. They ran to the building’s shelter, and when they came back, her partner began reading Telegram messages about missile strikes in Be'er Sheva.
"I glanced at the photo and told him it was my parents’ neighborhood, but not their building, and we went back to sleep," she says in her first in-depth interview since the tragedy that struck her four months ago. Sachs describes that dark morning with both sensitivity and painful detail. Parts of her story are difficult to read.
The sirens in the morning continued nonstop, forcing them to run up and down to the shelter several times. Meanwhile, social media was flooded with pictures from Be'er Sheva, while her mind, she says, went into denial mode. "I looked at the photos and told my partner, ‘Those are two corner buildings connected by four different façades.’ I couldn’t really tell if it was my parents' building or the one next to it."
Still, she decided to call them, but no one answered, which rarely happened. Ten minutes later, she got a visual clue that something was terribly wrong. "We turned on the TV and saw an aerial photo taken by a drone showing a destroyed building. I looked at the screen and saw the wicker swing that used to hang on my parents’ balcony. The balcony was destroyed, and only the swing was left. That’s when I realized it was my parents' home.
"I kept calling again and again, but no one answered. More alert sirens were sounded, so we ran back to the shelter, where there was no phone reception. At some point, I told my boyfriend, Roni, ‘We’re going there now!’ We grabbed the dogs and drove as fast as we could from Tel Aviv to Be'er Sheva. The whole time, no one was answering, neither my parents, my brother, nor his girlfriend Noa."
On the way, she saw a post on Ynet’s Instagram page showing a photo of her parents’ house. "I shared it on Instagram, asking for anyone who had seen Michal and Igor Sachs to please contact me.
Around the same time, my aunt called, saying she saw the building on the news and didn’t know what to do. We called every official institute we could think of, but they couldn’t tell us anything because the location of the strike was under a news blackout. We didn’t even know where to go."
As they entered Be'er Sheva, a news alert popped up on her phone, stating that three people were killed in a strike in the city - two women and a man. "I looked at my boyfriend in the car and said, ‘It must be them'."
They drove straight to Soroka Medical Center. Her boyfriend stayed outside with the dogs while she ran to the intensive care unit. At first, hospital staff told her no one from the Sachs family had been admitted, but then a clerk shouted, “They’re here!”
"I felt a weight lift off my chest," she says. "We’re a family of four, so I assumed it meant all three of them were there."
Sachs with her mother. "She taught me to seize the moment"
She was led into a curtained room, where she met her father. At that moment, she realized she had to pull herself together and become the responsible adult. "He was sitting there crying, trembling, looking like he’d just walked out of a terror scene, covered in blood, shrapnel wounds, scabs, and a head injury. I realized he was alive.
"When I asked where the others were, he looked at me," she pauses and takes a breath. "He mumbled in Russian, saying, ‘Eliana, they’re dead.’ I didn’t understand what he meant. I didn’t understand who he was talking about. I was sure my brother and mom were lying injured behind the curtain next to him.
"I hugged him, and through tears he told me he’d gone to the bathroom after they’d stepped out of the safe room, and suddenly there was a massive explosion. When he came out, he found them both dead, their bodies torn apart.
"I couldn’t process it. He was describing what he saw, and I started losing it right there, screaming. Within seconds my boyfriend came running in, asking what had happened. I told him, ‘They exploded! And my brother’s girlfriend was thrown out of the building by the blast!’"
The tragedy that struck the Sachs family was the result of a direct missile hit on their building. The family had followed safety instructions and remained inside their reinforced room, but the fatal strike occurred in the brief window between the Home Front Command's instructions to exit protected spaces and the next warning siren, which came immediately before the explosion.
"The safe room exploded, and its door collapsed on my mom," Eliana says. "I don’t know whether the safe room was properly built or not, but the kitchen was left intact; there was still a pot of pasta and hot dogs that my brother had made the night before.
"My dad had been in the bathroom on the eastern side of the apartment, near my mom’s studio, where her ceramic tools remained intact. My brother’s room was also untouched, his guitars were still there. If they had stayed in those rooms, they’d be alive. Only the safe room and the living room in the center of the apartment were destroyed. Nothing remained."
Are you angry with anyone?
"You’re asking what it feels like after something like this?"
There’s no way to truly understand, but grief has stages. I’m wondering which stage you’re in.
"It’s just immense rage. Not at the country or the politicians, but at the unfairness of life. The helplessness in the face of fate. The fact that at such a young age I lost my family fills me with fury. I’m only 24 and two weeks old. I had just celebrated my birthday!
"My brother was in the middle of interviews to become a combat medic because he wanted to save lives in battle. He always said it was noble to die for our country, and in the end, he didn’t even die on the battlefield. He had just been sent home the night before because his base lacked proper protection.
He and his girlfriend had stayed in Be'er Sheva instead of going to her parents’ home in Arad, where there were also sirens. I survived only because I had declined my parents’ invitation to join them that weekend.
"I remember standing in the hospital talking with a casualty officer and asking whether we’d be able to hold the funerals on time because I was worried about more missile strikes. He told me, ‘Eliana, there won’t be any more sirens. There’s a cease-fire.’
"Just an hour earlier, my mother and brother had been killed by a missile. And now I had to juggle their funerals, as she was a civilian and he was a soldier (eventually they were buried together in the military cemetery).
"I had to take care of my father, and handle logistics no 24-year-old should have to deal with. Half of my family was wiped out, and I still can’t fully process it. It was a tragic, unnecessary death, a brutal slap in the face. It feels like someone cut out a huge part of your body, and you wake up every morning with a hole in your heart."
"For years I was afraid to say I was a model"
Eliana Sachs was born in June 2001 at Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva. At 18, she moved to Tel Aviv, where she still lives. She began modeling a year earlier and has since worked with many leading fashion brands in Israel. Her brother Eitan had also just started modeling around that time.
Currently, Sachs appears in the Fall-Winter 2025–26 campaign for Factory 54, wearing pieces from top global fashion houses sold in the brand’s boutique stores.
"It feels like a closure, as it was one of my mom’s favorite stores," she says, after the photo shoot that took place in late September, just before Rosh Hashanah.
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"It feels like a closure, as it was one of my mom’s favorite stores". Sachs for Factory 54
(Photo: dudy Dayan)
"The entire concept of the campaign shooting was really meaningful to me, because it had to showcase strength and the power of fashion. Some shoots don’t leave you feeling empowered. This one did. I was so happy they chose me. It was a childhood dream come true."
Sachs isn’t a typical model who dreamed of fashion runways from a young age. In high school, she completed a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. In 11th grade, she began modeling thanks to her mother, who believed it would boost Sachs’s self-confidence.
"I was feeling bad about myself," she shares. "I had a lot of self-hate because of the physical changes during puberty. One day, my mom came across a random Facebook post looking for a model for a bridal boutique shoot in Tel Aviv. She reached out, and that was my first time in front of a camera.
"Later, I joined Yuli modeling agency, and I’ve been with them ever since. At the end of that shooting day, it was the first time in my life I didn’t feel like the ugliest person in the world."
Her school peers weren’t supportive. "At the time, I was being bullied in school," she recalls. "I was in an honors class, and one morning, 20 girls decided to stop speaking to me. I still don’t know exactly why. Back then, I thought it was because I wasn’t pretty enough, or thin enough, or good enough to be their friend."
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Sachs for Factory 54. "For years, I was afraid to say I was a model"
(Photo: Dudy Dayan)
With a degree in chemistry, didn’t you ever think of blowing up the classroom?
"Honestly, no," she laughs. "But a few months ago, I was featured in a major campaign, and a giant photo of me was displayed in the Grand Canyon shopping mall in Be'er Sheva. That felt like a closure. There isn’t a single person in Be'er Sheva who didn’t see it."
Looking back, do you think the self-hatred you experienced was just a natural part of adolescence?
"I'm still working on being able to look in the mirror without wanting to die. The hormones during those years make most of us insecure, as if our looks are the most important thing. As you grow older, you realize that’s not true.
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Sachs in school. "I was in an honors class, and one morning, 20 girls decided to stop speaking to me"
(Photo: Private album)
"I know my face is symmetrical and that I probably don’t look terrible, but I don’t walk into a room and feel like the most beautiful person there. I try to let my personality and my intelligence shine through and put those at the forefront."
You sound hesitant to admit you're beautiful.
"For years, I was afraid to say I was a model. Even though it's 2025, I was scared people would only see me as a pretty face. I wanted them to know there’s more to me than just how I look."
Have you ever used your looks to your advantage?
"I’ve worked my ass off, excuse the language, for everything I have. That’s how I was raised. That’s how I was taught. I don’t credit my looks for my success, because when I walk into a room, I start at the same point as everyone else. I don’t get a head start."
Do you think that drive comes from being the child of immigrants?
"Both my parents worked hard. My mom earned a degree while holding down three jobs and raising two small kids. My dad has worked hard his entire life, and I deeply respect the values they instilled in me and my brother.
"Some people walk into a room because they have connections or money or someone paved the way for them. But if you have no substance, no drive, you’ll stay exactly where you are. Thinking you deserve everything just because you have a pretty face is, in my opinion, foolish. In the end, you have to prove your true worth."
Sachs was exempted from mandatory military service due to a hereditary spinal condition called spondylolysis. Instead, she completed national service at the State Attorney’s Office in Tel Aviv. "I wanted to contribute to the country in a meaningful way through serving in a government institution," she says. Her next goal is to study law.
"I really want to bring justice to people. I believe in laws; it sounds nerdy, but they give us structure and define who we are. I want to join the public defender’s office and fight for people who need your help but can't afford it."
Wanting to become a lawyer for the sake of justice, rather than money, after such a tragic and unjust loss, does it feel like a new will you're writing for yourself?
"It’s exactly what I wrote for myself."
How much do you share about the tragedy?
"Lately, I’ve been spending more time in Be'er Sheva. And for better or worse, people know who I am. They come up to me, ask how I’m doing, offer help and want to show support. I draw strength from my father, who lost everything and still goes to work every day with a smile," she says.
"I don’t talk about the tragedy much. I was really anxious about this interview. I worried people would think I was using what happened to promote myself, but that’s the last thing I care about. It would dishonor their lives and deaths.
"The reason I agreed to speak was to keep their memory alive. I didn’t want them to be remembered just for how they died. As long as they’re remembered, they’re still alive."