34 days of uncertainty: Bereaved father writes about loss of IDF lookout soldier Roni Eshel |
It took a total of 34 days after the Hamas-led terror onslaught on October 7, 2023, for Eyal Eshel to find out that his missing daughter, surveillance soldier Roni Eshel, had been killed.
Eshel writes about those 34 unbearable days in “Abba Ba” (“Dad is Coming”), published by Sella Meir.
It’s a story that begins on October 7 and ends with Eshel’s funeral 34 days later, on November 12, 2023.
“I did it for the theater of the absurd that we’re living in,” said Eshel at the book launch on Thursday night. “This whole event could have been avoided, and I had a stomach full of pain that had to be emptied.”
Eshel wrote the 238-page Hebrew book together with veteran author Galila Ron-Feder-Amit. An English translation is upcoming.
Roni Eshel was considered missing for more than a month, as her parents begged publicly and desperately for information. On November 9, the IDF finally confirmed that she had been killed during the initial attack.
She had been in the army for a year and two months and had warned her superiors numerous times that Hamas terrorists were studying the border in preparation for something unknown, her father has said in multiple interviews.
Eyal Eshel remembers Roni telling him that when she turned 19 in September 2023, several weeks before the October 7 attack, a Hamas terrorist held up a sign from the other side of the Gaza border fence that read, “Happy birthday.”
Eshel was killed at the Nahal Oz base by infiltrating Hamas terrorists just after midday on October 7, along with more than a dozen of her fellow surveillance soldiers.
Fifteen surveillance soldiers were killed on Eshel’s base on October 7, and six were taken hostage.
“If I’d known........