Staff Sgt. Itay Martsiano, 20: Soccer player and beloved little brother
Killed battling Hamas terrorists near the entrance to Kibbutz Yad Mordechai on October 7
Staff Sgt. Itay Eliyahu Martsiano, 20, a platoon sergeant at the Paratroopers Brigade’s training base, from Beit Arif, was killed battling Hamas terrorists near Kibbutz Yad Mordechai on October 7.
At home on break the morning of the attack, Itay immediately headed to the front lines to join his comrades when he realized the scope of the attack. They set out toward Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, and near the entrance they encountered a group of runners from Sderot being attacked by a terrorists cell.
Itay, Staff Sgt. Ilay Gamzo, and two of the runners, Naomi Shitrit Azulay and Kobi Paryante were slain amid the firefight, while several others were wounded.
He was buried on October 9 near Lod. He is survived by his parents, Frida and Shlomo, and his two older sisters, Hila and Chen.
Itay was born and raised in Shoham, and his family had moved to the nearby Beit Arif in recent years, according to a eulogy on the Maccabi Haifa memorial site. He started playing soccer at age 5, and kept it up until he enlisted, with a true love of the sport.
Hila, who was 15 years older than Itay, told Channel 13 news that she begged her parents for another sibling, including putting on a show to attempt to convince them, and was overjoyed when he joined the family.
“I was like his mom, we were sort of the backup [parents], teaching him things, taking him to daycare, changing diapers,” she recounted. “And socially, he’d join our friends, he was sort of like our toy. As he grew up, he was so successful in everything, everything he touched — sports, he was super smart, he was a genius, our relationship became more like that of friends, and then he became an uncle.”
Writing in Ma’ariv ahead of Memorial Day, his mother, Frida, described Itay as “social, beloved, smart, talented and with a tendency to charm.”
“A boy to whom all the possibilities were open to be who he wanted to be. An excellent student, a talented soccer player, a musical child who loved to play and sing but was modest and hid his capabilities,” she continued. “But the thing that most characterized Itay was his huge love for his family, his friends and the country. A boy with morals who was willing to sacrifice his life for his friends and for the citizens of the State of Israel.”
The morning of October 7, she wrote, “I tried to stop you, to slow you down a little, but with the decisiveness of a boy becoming a man, you told me: ‘Mom, this is what I enlisted for.’… I wanted you to stay my own boy, my baby, and not one of the heroes of an entire nation.”
“We won’t celebrate your 21st birthday, because you’ll stay forever 20, you won’t take a big post-army trip as you wanted and had already planned for… You won’t keep studying, won’t get married, won’t have children, and we — we won’t have you. My boy, you were a child, a simple, modest, talented, smart, beautiful, strong boy, but a boy. A boy with dreams who wanted to live, who wanted to enjoy, to hang out, to grow up and to build a life in this country he loved, with the family he loved and the friends he loved.”