Photographer captures soldier’s final embrace

Ido Erez, a photographer for the Israeli news site Ynet, was on the Gaza border last Friday to cover a briefing by the head of the IDF’s Southern Command. While he was waiting for it to begin, Erez noticed a reservist embracing his girlfriend next to a tree.

Erez raised his camera, and snapped a picture. Little did he know that he had captured the last embrace between Staff Sgt. Adi Briga and his girlfriend Yulia Sokolov.

Briga, 23, died in a mortar attack on Monday on the Gaza-Israel border.

The last time she would ever see him. Sad photo making way across Israeli media this morning. Killed soon thereafter pic.twitter.com/UJKpFmhQqD

— Daniel Gordis (@DanielGordis) July 30, 2014

“I decided along with his mother Pnina and a few other friends from his moshav to bring food and other goods to Adi and his friends, and we traveled to their staging ground,” Yulia, 27, tells Ynet. “To that point, we had been talking every day, and couldn’t stop missing one another.”

They hadn’t seen each other in two weeks.

“I reached him at the exact place he was killed, and we didn’t do anything except stand and hug for a half hour…I saw photographers taking pictures of us, and I whispered to Adi, ‘Look, we’re like celebrities, we have paparazzi,’ and we both laughed. We just stood and hugged and we didn’t want to do anything else.”

By coincidence, Erez also covered Briga’s funeral. “I get chills thinking about it. He was captured twice by my camera in two different circumstances. Nothing like that has every happened to me in my life.”