Cpt. Etai Cohen, 22: Yahalom commander who loved basketball
Killed battling the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Alumim on October 7
Cpt. Etai Cohen, 22, a commander in the special forces Yahalom unit in the Combat Engineering Corps, from Rehovot, was killed on October 7 battling the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Alumim.
Off duty that weekend — hours after returning from a family trip to Cyprus — Etai immediately jumped into action when he heard of the attack, and rounded up his team to head down south before they were even called up.
His sister, Ofek, texted him around 10 a.m. and asked how he was feeling, in response he texted: “There are no feelings, just responsibility. Something happened here that should never have happened” — a sentence that his family has used to memorialize him around the world.
Etai was killed battling a cell of Hamas gunmen in Kibbutz Alumim.
He was buried on October 10 in Rehovot. He is survived by his parents, Ortal and Yaniv, and his siblings Ofek and Noam.
Born in Maryland in the US, Etai moved to Israel with his family when he was 6 months old. The oldest of his siblings, Etai grew up in Rehovot, where he attended local schools, focusing his high school studies on robotics and physics. He also played basketball with a local team — which added “Etai” to its name to honor him after his death.
His family said one of his dreams was to fly to the US to see Israeli NBA star Deni Avdija play a basketball game; after his death, Avdija paid tribute to Cohen in his first post-October 7 game by writing his name on his shoes. Among the plans they found after his death, Etai had also written about his desires to see Lebron James play, to watch a Formula 1 race and to attend concerts by Drake and Billie Eilish, his family told Maariv.
In December 2019 he enlisted in the IDF, in the elite Yahalom unit in the Combat Engineering Course. He later underwent an officer’s course, and signed up to stay an additional four years in the military past the mandatory period, which would include training with the US army, obtaining a bachelor’s degree and taking up a role as a company commander.
His father, Yaniv, told Army Radio that Etai was “a wonderful kid, who grew up here in Rehovot, a mature kid with good values, sociable, went out to give back to the country, to have a meaningful military service, and that’s how he got to Yahalom.”
Asked how he wanted Etai to be remembered, Yaniv said “the way he was — all his close friends who knew him well [remembered him] as a top-notch man, a loyal friend, who knew how to laugh but also to be serious. A smart guy, who loved sports.”
