‘I didn’t want to be a hero,’ says only female soldier severely wounded in Gaza
In TV interview, Gaya Zubery, paramedic for the 53rd Armored Battalion, discuss her injury, recovery and the role of women in the army
The first and only female soldier to be severely wounded in the Gaza war is in rehab and on the way to recovery.
Sgt. Gaya Zubery, 20, a paramedic for the 188th Armored Brigade’s 53rd Battalion, is slowly regaining use of her legs, after sustaining bullet wounds and fractures while tending to wounded soldiers during fighting in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood.
As a paramedic, Zubery was part of a medical crew that included herself, three male battlefield medics and another female doctor.
On December 7, as the Israel Defense Forces waged a fierce battle to take over Shejaiya — then a stronghold of the Hamas terror group — Zubery and her crew were alerted that a tank in their unit had been hit by an explosive.
“The doctor said to us: ‘A tank is on fire, prepare yourselves — there will be severe wounds,'” Zubery told Channel 12 news in a report broadcast Friday. The medical crew rushed to the scene, where Zubery and the doctor, identified as Lt. Bar, tended to wounded soldiers, as their colleagues gave first aid to one of the tank’s injured crew members.
The explosion claimed the lives of two tank soldiers: Master Sgt. (res.) Naftali Yonah Gordon, 32, and Sgt. First Class (res.) Omri Rot, 25, the tank’s commander.
Entry to the tank was blocked, and another of its injured crew members was trapped inside. When the medics retrieved the second injured crew member, they shouted over the gunfire for Zubery, their superior, to come help.
As Zubery ran over, she was shot in the leg. “I saw her clutch her leg” before she fell over, said Cpl. Zvi, one of the medics.
Zvi approached Zubery to carry her out of harm’s way, but when he tried to pick her up, he noticed he couldn’t feel his hand — he, too, had been seriously wounded, and would be unable to pick up Zubery.
Lt. Bar rushed to Zubery’s side to treat her. Soon, Zubery was put on a stretcher, under the watch of another female paramedic in the unit, Sgt. Noy.
Zubery remembered asking, “Noy, if you can, take off my tourniquet, I don’t want to lose my leg.” Noy, in turn, gave Zubery a strong painkiller, wishing her “Sweet dreams, my beauty,” Zubery recounted with a smile.
The next thing she knew, she was being rushed through Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center for an emergency operation. One of Zubery’s legs had an open fracture. The other was full of shrapnel after a bullet had passed straight through it.
A month after being admitted, Zubery was out of her wheelchair. The rehabilitation clinic at Tel Hashomer’s Sheba Medical Center is now her “second home,” Zubery’s mother Meirav told Channel 12. Doctors expect Zubery’s recovery will last a year.
“I survived Gaza, I will survive this as well,” Zubery said.
She told Channel 12 that she is the only female soldier in rehab. “I’m a bit out of the ordinary here,” she said.
Zubery’s father Shlomi was diagnosed with ALS a few years ago and is bedridden. When Meirav first came to visit her daughter, Zubery apologized to her: “I’m sorry mom, you don’t need another disabled person at home,” Meirav recalled her daughter saying.
Shlomi communicates with the help of a computer. In an emotional scene, when Zubery first came home from the hospital, she knelt by her father’s bed to kiss him, and his computer read aloud: “Good morning to my fighter who is making good progress in rehab. I love and appreciate you and am so very proud of you.”
Because of her father’s condition, Zubery was technically exempt from joining her battalion when it entered Gaza, but she insisted on doing so anyway. When asked if she would do so again, she answered without missing a beat: “Yes.”
“Would you not even think twice?” the reporter asked.
“Maybe a little, about my mother,” she said.
In one scene in the TV report, Zubery entered a physical therapy session wearing an army shirt that read, “I know I’m a hero, no need to remind me,” written in Hebrew’s masculine form. Zubery quipped that the shirt’s slogan was misspelled, missing the letters that would make it feminine.
Still, Zubery told her interviewer that she does not feel like a hero. “I’m not different from anyone else who is out there. There are a ton of female paramedics in Gaza,” she said. “I don’t think people know how many women there are in Gaza.”
Indeed, Channel 12 noted the adulation Zubery feels for her superior, Lt. Bar, who the reporter said has been dubbed by soldiers “the battalion’s superhero.”
Mickey, a male paramedic from Zubery’s battalion, told Channel 12: “People said that women can’t go in [to battle]… that they wouldn’t be able to handle it… it’s completely bogus — they do the same work we do, even better.”
“I didn’t want to make history,” Zubery told Channel 12. “I didn’t want to be a hero. I just wanted to do my job.”
The current war in Gaza has seen unprecedented mobilization of female combat troops, following the IDF’s concerted effort in recent years to integrate women into combat roles.
On October 7, as thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel, female soldiers were directly involved in battles to defend against the massive numbers of invading gunmen. One all-female tank unit fought for hours, killing dozens of attackers along the border and in communities attacked by Hamas. Female soldiers were also among those killed by Hamas and among those taken hostage alongside their male counterparts.
The military’s effort to integrate women into combat roles had previously elicited fierce backlash from conservative elements bent on maintaining gender-based segregation in the army, with some claiming women were physically or emotionally incapable of combat, and accusing the army of pursuing a dangerous social experiment with potential ramifications for national security.
Defenders of the effort cast it as a long-needed measure, one that has already been implemented in many Western countries, which would provide the army with much-needed manpower.
Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.
