Maj. Amir Skoury, 31: Sayeret Matkal soldier who was ‘all-in’ on life

Maj. Amir (Meir) Skoury, 31, a Sayeret Matkal soldier, from Jerusalem, was killed on October 7 battling the Hamas invasion of Kibbutz Be’eri.

Amir and his family were staying with his parents over the holiday weekend when the attack began, and he immediately got ready to join the fighting, even though he was on leave from the army to pursue his studies.

He headed down south, and engaged in a fierce firefight with Hamas gunmen at a junction just outside Kibbutz Be’eri and was killed in the battle. Two other Sayeret Matkal soldiers were killed in Be’eri that day — Lt. Nave Lax and Maj. David Meir.

Amir was buried on October 9 in Netanya. He is survived by his wife, Yona, their two daughters, Avigayil and Naama, his parents, Haya and Avi, and his older siblings, Yitzhak, Shimri and Lior.

Two months after he was killed, Amir’s close childhood friend, Master Sgt. Daniel Ben Harosh, was killed fighting in Gaza. After Daniel’s death, a video emerged of him telling his comrades in reserves duty about Amir and his legacy.

“I could talk about him a lot, we grew up together in Ramat Hasharon, there are so many things I could say but it’s hard to define in words a connection to a friend who is like a brother,” Daniel told his soldiers. “One of the things I loved so much and I will take with me is that he was all-in with everything he did, he was in the army for 12 years, first in Givati, and I never understand how he could be all-in on the army and all-in at home as a dad, the same as he was with his hobbies.”

Daniel said Amir was supposed to compete in an Iron Man a month after he was killed, “he really took everything from A to Z and succeeded in doing it,” including starting university studies in his 30s, being a husband and a father to two young daughters and even finding time to volunteer. “He’s given me a lot of strength in the past month and a half.”

Born and raised in Ramat Hasharon, Amir attended the Bnei Akiva Ra’anana Yeshiva before enlisting in the IDF in 2011, serving first in the Givati Brigade before being tapped to join the prestigious Sayeret Matkal reconnaissance unit.

After 12 years serving in the army, Amir took a break to pursue a degree as part of his military career, studying for the year before his death at the Shalem College in Jerusalem. He and his wife Yona and their two young daughters had recently settled in a new home in Jerusalem.

Amir was also an active athlete, taking part in triathlons and Iron Man competitions and finding time to train even amid his busy schedule.

In his memory, his cousin, Lital, started a project to widely share details about families sitting shiva for their loved ones to encourage people to visit.

“We were very close in age, we miss him and are so pained and we wanted to do something in his memory — this is my little way of memorializing him so that he won’t be forgotten,” Lital told the Makor Rishon newspaper.

Amir, she said, “was a modest guy, he’d never start a sentence with the word ‘I,’ he was less about talking and more about doing. This is what I learned from Amiri, to do things quietly and modestly, and I miss him so much.”

Marking 11 months since he was killed, his mother, Haya, wrote on Facebook that she wished to “go back in time.”

“To when? To any moment before October 7, and even to that morning when you flew out of the house. To go back to another hug and another kiss and just more you, my darling, Amiri.”

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