In 2002, 19-year-old Amit Hasdai spent more than a week in a coma after he was shot in the neck during an IDF operation in Qalqilya in the West Bank.
Paralyzed on the right side of his body, Hasdai’s parents were told that he would never walk or talk again, and never return to leading an active life.
Next week, Hasdai, now 41 and a married father of two, will have his Paralympic debut at the Paris Games, competing in handcycling.
Hasdai is one of just three of the 28 Paralympians representing Israel this year who were wounded during military service. But 10 months into Israel’s longest and deadliest war in decades, Israeli Paralympic officials are already thinking about the 2028 Games in Los Angeles — and the influx of new talent they expect after thousands of soldiers have been wounded in the fighting.
“A lot of the young people were athletes already before they were wounded, and they were in incredible shape,” said Moshe “Mutz” Matalon, 71, the chairman of the Israel Paralympic Committee who has spearheaded the project they are informally calling “From Gaza to Los Angeles.”
Matalon — a former Paralympian who was injured during his army service in the 1970s and has used a wheelchair since — said toward the end of last year, as wounded soldiers started to move to rehab units, he and others began to visit, bringing with them parasporting champions and specialized equipment in an effort to provide goals and motivations to those struggling to adjust to a new life.
“We started to send athletes and coaches to the rehab centers, in coordination of course with the doctors and physiotherapists,” said Matalon. “And we started to bring equipment to the hospitals, hand bikes and tennis and table tennis and archery — almost everything except shooting.”
Unthinkable influx
For decades, Israel was a Paralympic powerhouse, sending large delegations to the Games, which officially launched in 1960, and raking in medals and accolades.
Speaking to The Times of Israel in 2021, Ron Bolotin, the general manager of the Israel Paralympic Committee, explained that Israel saw its heyday at the Games when it had a large number of wounded soldiers as well as polio survivors.
“In the ’60s and ’70s and even ’80s, Israel was one of the countries with a big contingent of young people who were wounded in wars, the Yom Kippur War, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition,” Bolotin said at the time, also pointing to a smaller number of competing countries in the Games’ early years.
In 1976, Israel raked in a whopping 69 medals at the Toronto Paralympics, in 1980 it came home with 46 and in 1984 its parathletes won 44 medals. Comparatively, in 2008, Israel won six Paralympic medals, in 2012 it nabbed eight and in 2016 just three.
“Today, happily, there aren’t a huge number of those wounded in the IDF with relevant disabilities,” Bolotin said three years ago, just ahead of the Tokyo Paralympics. “There’s better medicine, fewer wars, there’s no polio so we just have to find the right children and teens around the country. That’s our future.”
Like the rest of the country, Bolotin, who lost a leg to a landmine during his IDF service in 1975 and later won 11 swimming medals for Israel across his six Paralympic appearances, could never have foreseen the devastating October 7 Hamas attack and the grueling ongoing war in Gaza.
As of mid-August, the Defense Ministry’s rehabilitation department said it has treated 10,056 soldiers since the start of the war, including 37% with physical trauma to their limbs. The majority, 51% of those wounded, are under age 30, while another 31% are aged 30-40.
In the first couple months of the war, Matalon said, a grassroots cooperation quickly developed between the Israel Paralympic Committee, the IDF Disabled Veterans Organization and The Israel Sports Association for the Disabled to reach out to recuperating soldiers, gather donations and distribute supplies.
Workers and volunteers approached most if not all of the soldiers in rehab to offer them sporting outlets. Many were very receptive, said Matalon, noting, however, that it is a “very difficult period” for those coming to terms with their new reality following serious wounds, amputations and paralysis.
Nevertheless, he said, many have expressed interest, with “more than 100” wounded soldiers using the provided equipment, including over 30 regularly riding on handcycles.
The 2028 Games may be four years away, but most of the soldiers are far from physically or emotionally being ready to compete internationally.
Matalon believes forward-thinking optimism is the best approach, “and I hope that we’ll succeed in bringing excellent athletes either to Los Angeles or to the Olympics after it.”
Opening up possibilities
On November 9, 2023, Ido Kander, 27, entered Gaza to join his comrades fighting against Hamas in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. A day later, he was seriously wounded when he and other troops in the 551st Brigade’s 697th Battalion approached a booby-trapped tunnel.
In the same explosion, four of his comrades – Maj. (res.) Moshe Leiter, Sgt. Maj. (res.) Yossi Hershkovitz, Master Sgt. (res.) Matan Meir, and Master Sgt. (res.) Sergey Shmerkin – were killed, and five others were seriously wounded.
“I remember trying to move my body, not being able to,” Kander told The Times of Israel in a recent phone interview. He was airlifted to Shaare Zedek in Jerusalem with a broken shoulder and severe damage to his leg, undergoing two surgeries there and a third after he was transferred to the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer.
During his time in rehab, he said, “they told me that there’s these guys coming to ride with bikes, and I should try it… so I went there with my wheelchair, of course, and I started trying it, and I found that I can do this thing – I can sweat, I can feel sporty, and I can do something which is [exercise], which has some intensity after months of just laying in bed doing literally nothing.”
That experience “just opened up for me again the possibility of sport,” Kander said, noting that before he was wounded he was training to run a marathon. “I started doing gym in the afternoons for my upper body, and I started pushing — sport is the one thing that can save you. Nothing can save you like sports after you’ve laid down for so much time doing nothing.”
After five months in recovery, Kander finally returned home in April. He goes back to rehab two or three times a week to regain movement in his shoulder and leg, including riding handcycles with several other soldiers who were wounded alongside of him, all of whom had at least one leg amputated.
Kander said he still is hoping to make a full recovery and return to running, eventually leaving the handcycles behind. For the others he was wounded with, “they’re all amputees. So for them, it probably will stick as a bigger part of their life. And we do it together sometimes. We meet up and we ride together — we ride, we die together.”
‘You let life win’
Matalon, who knows firsthand the healing power of sport, is keenly aware of the harsh incongruities between the pains and losses of war and the hopes and achievements of competitive sports.
“It’s an incredible dissonance, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “On the one hand, my heart expands and on the other hand I come home, I’m not embarrassed to say, with tears in my eyes.”
When he returns home from visiting the wounded soldiers, Matalon said, “I have a huge smile, over what a victory it is to bring people from the hospital bed to [active sports], but then you say, ‘Damnit to hell — what they went through, what they’re going through, what a price they paid, are we even worthy of these people?’”
But he is motivated, he said, not by the thought of winning medals in future competitions, but by providing goals and encouragement to those facing the complete upheaval of the lives they once knew.
Matalon was wounded during his army service in 1974, and began doing sports as part of his rehab later that year. By 1975, he was already competing internationally and in 1976 he represented Israel at the Paralympic Games in Toronto.
“Sport really helped my physical rehabilitation, but also my mental rehabilitation, my self-image, my self-worth, made me feel like I’m just like everyone else and not any less,” he said. “You don’t let the handicap hold you back, you let life win.”
Matalon recounted that during a recent visit to a rehab center, a soldier approached him and asked him: “‘Can you be happy in a wheelchair?’ And I said ‘Of course! You can have a full life in a wheelchair.’”
“You have to decide that’s what you want, and you can be the best in the world,” he added. “I have four kids, I have grandchildren – when I was 20, I didn’t believe this would be my life,” he recalled. “I remember being in the hospital, I had questions – how can I live in a wheelchair?’”
That, he said, is “our job: They see the sports, they want to succeed, they have motivation, they’re super competitive. I do it because I owe them this, we owe them this, the country owes them this, the citizens owe them this.”
