Sgt. First Class Ohad Cohen, 20: Elite fighter who loved and was loved
Killed battling Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7
Sgt. First Class Ohad Cohen, 20, a soldier in the Israeli Air Force’s elite Shaldag unit, from Idan, was killed battling Hamas terrorists on October 7 in Kibbutz Be’eri.
The morning of the attack, Ohad was on duty with the members of his unit when the assault began, and they were the first military forces to be sent to Be’eri, where hundreds of Hamas terrorists had invaded. They arrived via helicopter around 9 a.m.
The 13 Shaldag fighters entered the kibbutz, and Ohad was the first soldier killed there that day, leading the small number of troops to decide to withdraw to the entrance of the kibbutz and evacuate the wounded. Further military reinforcements did not arrive for several hours.
Ohad was buried in Idan on October 10. He is survived by his parents, Michal and Moshe, his sisters Nitzan, Ron and Clil and his girlfriend Ofir, as well as three grandparents. His uncle, Staff Sgt. Shahar Cohen, was also killed at age 20, almost exactly 32 years earlier, while fighting in south Lebanon.
According to a Shaldag eulogy, Ohad enlisted in the IDF in late 2021, after a year in a pre-military academy in Kibbutz Sufa. He completed the elite unit’s tough training — the longest of any IDF unit — just a few months before he was killed. During his training, he was bitten by a snake and hospitalized in serious condition but recovered to return to his unit.
Ohad loved to read and write and engage in sports and exercise, particularly running, as well as traveling and hiking around the country. He was active in a local youth group in the small town in the desert along the border with Jordan where he grew up, first as a member and later as a counselor.
A eulogy on the Central Arava Regional Council website described him as “a smart boy, highly moral, social and smiley. Almost all of his friends remember first and foremost his kind smile that best characterized him, his sensitivity and the light he spread around him.”
His younger sister, Clil, wrote on Instagram that she didn’t want to eulogize her beloved brother, “because I don’t want to say goodbye, I want you to show up at the door on Friday afternoon after a tough week and bring mom flowers and ask me, ‘How was your week?'”
“I want you to get mad at me for not cleaning up the house, and because there are ‘girl things’ in the shower,” she continued. “I want you to come with Ofir for Shabbat and sit at Friday night dinner and we’ll all laugh together like everything is normal. I want you to throw Or in the air and make him laugh and we’ll all watch from the side. I just want you here.”
In her eulogy, his mother, Michal, wrote that Ohad was “a child full of love, full of goodness. Wherever you went, you made everyone fall in love with you — and how could they not?”
“You always ran to help, you were always happy, you did everything with ease and with love,” she added. “There was a time when Dad and I couldn’t go anywhere in the Arava without someone approaching us and saying, ‘You’re Ohad’s parents? You have the most wonderful child in the world.’ And when they left we’d whisper, ‘Who was that?'”
In the army, she said, “You blossomed and you grew, you became a man. Wonderful and unique… after all, if Ohad had been in charge of how this event would go, we’d probably all be here in clown hats with a beer in our hands.”
