We must always remember their sacrifice, PM says

Netanyahu addresses a gathering at the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery.

“We, the members of bereaved families, don’t need Memorial Day to remember our beloved ones,” he says, “but on this day, Memorial Day, the entire nation is with us, embracing us with love.”

He says shortly after he was drafted to the IDF in 1967, two of his friends — David and Zohar — were critically hurt. David “passed his last moments in my arms, between life and death, and when we got to Tel Hashomer, both were pronounced dead,” he says.

“Even decades later, when I got to visit David’s warm family, I saw his mother left his room” exactly as he left it, he says.

Netanyahu tells of another encounter with the mother — a Holocaust survivor — of a fallen comrade, Chaim. “Her tone said everything,” he says. “Every family has its suffering.”

“At the moment we are told, our worlds are destroyed,” Netanyahu says.

He says that when he hears soldiers have been killed “my heart breaks with his family.” The prime minister says he makes decisions about military operations “with his heart no less than with his head.”

Addressing the recent terror wave, he praises policewoman Hadar Cohen, killed in action in February by Damascus Gate. He notes that days later, an Israeli family chose to name their baby Hadar. “In Israel, boys and girls are named for the defenders of our people,” he says.

“The bereavement crosses ethnic lines and unites between them,” he says.

“We should remember at every moment the price” people have paid, and the “sacrifice of our heroes,” Netanyahu says.

He wishes a speedy recovery to those injured, and says Israel will work to return the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul. “I promise we won’t give up,” he says.