Soldier killed by landmine laid to rest

Hundreds of fellow soldiers, family, and friends attended the funeral Thursday night of Cpl. Roi Alphi, 19 — who was killed by a land mine on the Golan Heights — packing and overflowing the military section of the cemetery of his hometown, Gan Yavne.

Alphi, who was in advanced training in the Combat Engineering Corps, was clearing a Golan Heights minefield when an anti-tank mine inexplicably exploded on Tuesday afternoon. The IDF is still investigating the incident.

Alphi’s base commander, the local mayor, and the mother of one if his closest friends eulogized Alphi as an exemplary soldier, an optimist, modest, generous, a good friend and — especially — a young man who always had a smile on his face.

Alphi was inducted into the IDF in November. He was the fifth of five children, with three brothers and a sister.

He and his colleagues were clearing anti-tank mines in the southern Golan, near the small town of Yonatan, as part of ongoing mine-clearing operations by the IDF in several locations.

A senior source in the engineering corps said the mine was Israeli, in a field that dated from the 1990s, and had been discovered earlier in the day, uncovered, and marked.

The soldier did not step on the mine, which in any case was meant to require more than the weight of a person to detonate, but he was very close to it when it exploded, IDF sources said. It was of a kind designed to explode if an armored vehicle went over it. Two other soldiers were very lightly injured in the blast.