Staff Sgt. Ofek Arbib, 21: Off-duty soldier saved his friends at rave

Staff Sgt. Ofek Arbib, 21, a member of the Paratroopers Brigade from Bat Yam, was killed on October 7 while fleeing the Supernova music festival during an off-duty weekend.

Ofek headed to the rave with a group of friends on Friday night after a holiday meal at his grandmother’s house. With the start of the attack, he and his friends were among the first to leave, and he called another friend who had stayed behind to warn him about the terrorist invasion, saving his life, according to an IDF eulogy.

Around 7 a.m., Ofek and his friends got to the Yad Mordechai junction where Hamas terrorists were lying in wait. Ofek protected them with his body and was killed by the gunfire, while the two friends escaped the car and ran for safety. After five days of searching, Ofek’s body was identified. His family said that all of his other friends who attended the rave managed to survive.

He was buried in Holon on October 12. He is survived by his parents, Ilana and Nissim, his older siblings Snir, Meshi and Bar and his stepsisters, Tal and Shahar.

Born and raised in Jerusalem, he moved at 15 to Bat Yam to live with his father and attend high school there. Ofek had a number of different hobbies, including photography, Thai boxing, and all sorts of sport and exercise, even hiking the Israel Trail while he was in high school.

At age 20 he bought a motorcycle and had dreams of an extensive bike trip overseas with his father. In his memory, family and friends staged a motorcycle convoy, marking a month since his funeral. After finishing high school, Ofek spent six months in a pre-army academy, and in 2021 he enlisted in the Paratroopers Brigade, hoping to later pursue an officer’s course.

His sister, Bar, wrote on Instagram in December to Ofek that her “revenge is to keep living, to smile our smile, to laugh and make others laugh like only we knew how, to take your trip to the Far East, to go to the beach for you.

“To travel around Israel like you loved so much, to be a new sister to your friends, to be a sister to your comrades,” she wrote. “To pass through the boardwalk where you used to come with your motorcycle and sit for coffee. My revenge will be in the shape of life, the shape of pure love, the shape of generosity, the shape of a wide heart to anyone who needs it.

“My revenge will be in the shape of art, in the shape of music you loved all the time,” she added. “My revenge will be to memorialize your life, and not to live with the grief and your death. Our revenge is to stay the siblings we were.”

Ofek’s father, Nissim, told a local news site that his son was “a lot of fun, a daddy’s boy, the kind that every father would dream of having. He was a friend and a son together. A kid who never asked for money, he always knew how to work things out, and he spread love to the world.”

“He would see people begging on the street and he would give them money like he was a Rothschild,” his father added. “If needed, he’d collect donations and bring food to people’s homes. More than once he called me from the army and said, ‘Someone in Bat Yam’s house burned down, we need to help them.’… He’d convince us to go, to buy paint and help them fix the house. You could never say no to him.”

Nissim said that Ofek’s dream “was always when he was released from the army, we’d go on a joint [motorcycle] trip to all sorts of places, we were planning to go together to Morocco and Italy… Sadly, we’ll never get to go on those trips.”

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