Citing IDF failures, family of soldier killed in Lebanon leaves Israel: ‘We can’t find solace here’

The family of Sgt. Gur Kehati, who was killed in 2024 while guarding a civilian researcher’s tour in Lebanon, decided to leave Israel over the negligence exposed in the incident, according to a Haaretz profile published Thursday.

The family has reportedly been furious at the army’s initial hesitance to disclose the full troubling details of the incident, the subsequent slow pace of its investigation and the lack of meaningful consequence for those involved.

“We can’t find solace here. We can’t recover here. To recover, you need community, an embrace, support, a vision of a future. And there isn’t any,” Gur’s father Ron told the newspaper.

Gur, 20, was part of a detachment from the Golani infantry brigade that escorted Ze’ev Erlich, a 71-year-old researcher who was wearing an IDF uniform, to a medieval fortress in southwest Lebanon’s Shamaa on November 20, 2024 — a week before Israel and Hezbollah reached a ceasefire agreement.

The fortress is revered by Christians and Shiite Muslims as the 1st-century burial place of Saint Peter.

Hezbollah gunmen ambushed the detachment, killing Erlich and Gur, seriously wounding an officer in Gur’s battalion and moderately wounding Col. (res.) Yoav Yarom, Golani’s chief of staff at the time.

Erlich was shot first, and Gur, a medic, was killed when he rushed to save the researcher.

The family described the series of failures that led to Gur’s death and the treatment it got from the IDF as “a horror movie.”

Gur’s mother, Maayan, said that the many soldiers killed in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught and the following war were “nobody’s children,” adding: “How can I stay in this country? My children are what my life is about. Who is speaking up for these children we raised to go out, spend a year volunteering and enlist?”

She said that in a meeting in July with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the latter told her: “I hear you’re leaving the country.” She answered: “We’re not. The country has given up on us.”

Yarom had let Erlich into Lebanon without the necessary approvals — the officer claimed in a military investigation that commenced only three months later that he believed the fortress compound had been cleared of threats and that there were operational justifications for the visit.

However, lower-ranking commanders and soldiers have said they were unaware of any such justification, and that the conduct of the force indicated the excursion was merely a tour, according to material from the investigation cited by Haaretz.

The material from the investigation — which was presented to the family only in July this year — also showed dozens of senior commanders had for years let Erlich tour combat zones, and that he had bombarded Yarom for weeks with requests to tour various sites in Lebanon, Haaretz said.

Yarom was dismissed from the army over the incident, but only months after he voluntarily stepped down. The military decided not to prosecute him.

In protest of the decision, Gur’s family uprooted the headstone from his military grave and left it in front of the IDF General Staff’s office at the army’s headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Gur’s parents and two of his siblings now live in Crete, with another 20-year-old brother still in Israel and serving in the IDF, according to Haaretz.

“I don’t have a group I belong to anymore,” said Maayan. “I can’t send the children to a school controlled by this Education Ministry. When I go shopping, I see the people of Israel, and Gur’s blood is smeared across all their faces.”

She told the newspaper that she was disappointed even by those who campaigned on her and others’ behalf.

“Nobody takes action. Another rally at Habima [Square], another demonstration. Nobody shuts the country down. And I don’t mean over Gur. Gur is my pain. They didn’t shut the country down over the surveillance soldiers who were abandoned [on October 7]. We’re being swallowed up, just as Gur was swallowed up.”

“Our entire family was killed,” she told Haaretz. “To think that you could raise a child, and then he’s taken away from you and used, as though he were disposable — these are things that never crossed my mind.”