Roi Moshe, 36: Firefighter named the daughter he never got to meet

Roi Moshe, 36, from Ashkelon, was killed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 while trying to return home.

Roi, a firefighter, served as deputy team chief in the Beersheba station, and was posthumously granted the rank of first sergeant major.

He had just wrapped up an overnight shift and was headed home when the Hamas attack began. He was ambushed by Hamas terrorists near the Gevim Junction outside Sderot, tried to flee into a nearby field and was murdered.

He is buried in Ashkelon on October 10. He is survived by his wife, Linor, their two children, Daniel, 9, and Harel, 7, and their daughter, Gili, who was born in January 2024, three months after her father’s death. He is also survived by his parents, Nitza and Binyamin, and six siblings, Meital, Moran, Adir, Kfir, Liel and Matanel.

The oldest in his large family, Roi grew up in a religious home, attending religious schools before enlisting in the army, completing an officer’s course and later attending a yeshiva.

Roi and Linor met in 2011 when she was in the army and he was serving in reserve duty in the Givati Brigade. Though they came from very different backgrounds, they overcame their differences and wed in 2013, welcoming two children into the world. Linor then had two miscarriages, she told Maariv, and Roi was so excited at the prospect of their third child, picking out Gili as her name and swearing Linor to secrecy.

Roi joined the Israel Fire and Rescue Services in 2018. At his funeral, Itzik Oz, the commander of the southern district, described Roi as “active, dedicated, brave, an excellent firefighter and a guy with a sense of humor who made sure to keep the shift united, a true friend, an intelligent guy, professional, caring and ambitious.”

His younger brother, Matanel, told a local news site that Roi chose to work in Beersheba instead of in Ashkelon “because there’s more work in Beersheba. He really wanted to work, [there] it’s like an elite unit for firefighters because they’re responsible for the whole Negev. There’s action, he didn’t like to sit back and do nothing.”

Roi, he said, “was always like that. Even when we’d get the house ready for Shabbat, everything was quick and efficient.” Matanel noted that Roi was older than him by 16 years, “and he was also a brother, also a father figure, also a friend, he was everything. He raised me, raised us, all the siblings — he raised us his whole life. He was always there with his knowledge, with his life experience, he was super smart.”

Roi’s wife, Linor, told Kan public radio that her husband was “a professional, he did this job out of a sense of mission.”

She said he was in the middle of studying engineering when he decided to switch paths, telling her, “‘I need to be active, I can’t sit in an office, I need to save people, to do something with my life,'” she recounted. “Roi was a man of action. He was an entire world… he was just light. Full of generosity.”

After he was shot, Roi managed to send a voice note to Linor, telling her that he loved her, loved the kids, asking her to take care of them, to move on with her life, adding: “You’re my queen and I know I can rely on you.”

Linor told Ynet that when he sent the message, “He was already wounded, he knew it was the end. That was my Roi — he gave me a loving and romantic end, that will stay with me for the rest of my life.”

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