Staff Sgt. Adam Agmon, 21: Rugby fan planned to work with at-risk youth

Staff Sgt. Adam Agmon, 21, a soldier in the Paratrooper’s Brigade, from Kamon in the Galilee, was killed on October 7 battling the Hamas invasion of Kibbutz Kissufim.

The morning of the attack, Adam and his comrades were in the middle of a squad commander’s course with the Bismalach Brigade at a base next Yeruham, but were immediately called into action. They went first to Kibbutz Nirim and later nearby the site of the Supernova festival in Re’im before being sent to battle Hamas gunmen in Kissufim.

Throughout the day he updated his father about their movements, telling him via WhatsApp that they “killed two terrorists at the Re’im Junction.” Arriving at Kissufim, Adam and his comrades — all Paratroopers in the midst of the same course — worked to rescue the besieged residents and slay the Hamas gunmen still inside the kibbutz.

Adam and Saar Margolis, a member of Kissufim’s local security team, were killed Saturday afternoon by gunfire while trying to rescue a family barricaded inside their home overrun by Hamas terrorists. Alongside him, his comrades Sgt. Omri Peretz, Sgt. Matan Malka, Sgt. Bar Yankilov, Sgt. Lavi Buchnik and Sgt. Regev Amar were also slain in Kissufim.

Adam was buried on October 12 in the Misgav cemetery near Karmiel. He is survived by his parents, Shlomit and Oren, and older brother Yahel. A month after he was slain, Adam’s step-brother-in-law, Master Sgt. (res.) Dov Moshe (Dubi) Kogan, was killed fighting in Gaza.

Born in New Zealand to Israeli parents, Adam and his family moved back to Israel when he was young, and he grew up in the small town of Kamon in the Lower Galilee.

A devoted sports nut, Adam and his brother and father were fans of the New Zealand national rugby team All Blacks — even sharing the same tattoo of the team’s logo — as well as of the Hapoel Haifa soccer team. He himself played as a youth for the Kiryat Shmona soccer team and had a deep love for the sport.

Before enlisting in the IDF, Adam complete a year of national service working with youth at a therapeutic boarding school in Haifa. His family said that after his release from the army, he had a job lined up at the Hapoel Tel Aviv nonprofit that deals with at-risk youth.

His older brother, Yahel, wrote on Instagram on what would have been Adam’s 22nd birthday, noting that he would “never reach the age where you were supposed to be released from the army.”

“You were waiting for it so much, we talked and planned about the when and the where and the why and how excited you were to explore the world and yourself,” he wrote.

Yahel said he now felt a responsibility to explore the world for both of them, as “you’re not physically here to see, but the light that you are and the joy that you are — I feel inside me so strongly.” Alongside the pain and the loss, he said, he feels a sense of luck,”that I had the best brother in the world.”

Adam’s father, Oren, told Haaretz that while he was in the army, they had a deal that Adam would text him every single day to let him know he was alive. In the year since he was killed, Oren has sent his son a message every single day.

“I’m an all-in father,” he said. “Where my children are, that’s where I am. Attached to them. There for them. Fighting all their battles. Because neither Yahel nor Adam were exactly at the top of their class, to put it mildly… they both played soccer. So I never missed a game, except once. I’m talking to you about 20 years. Being there for them 24/7.”

Oren said if he ever heard that “at 4 in the morning they’re at some party. ‘Dad, I have a headache, come and pick me up’ – I go get them. Once, on Yom Kippur, I went out in the middle of the night to get them from some forest near Lake Kinneret, because they didn’t feel well.”

Adam’s father said his son “decided to sacrifice himself. Knowingly. In order to save the people of Kissufim… Adam is not a classic leader,” he said. “Yet on that day he displayed some sort of pure leadership ability.”

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