The reservist mother who swapped places with her wounded husband

Captain in the reserves Roni Refeld Blot says her family’s life changed after her husband, Pizzy, a team commander in Brigade 300 headquarters, was critically wounded by a bullet to the head on October 9, 2023, two days after the war began. A soldier under him was killed in the same incident on the Lebanon border. When she arrived at the hospital, she recalls a guard asking whether she was there for the wounded or the dead, and realizing she had reached a turning point. Her husband returned home after a month, and she became his full-time caregiver while also raising their three children.

After nearly five months of intensive rehabilitation, Pizzy regained independence, and by February 2024 Refeld Blot told him, “There is no way there is no one in this house serving in reserves.” She persuaded one of his brothers to take her into reserves, and from being a former company commander at Havat HaShomer she became a battalion operations NCO with the Paratroopers. She then spent a full year serving in the same Lebanon-sector area where her husband had been wounded, while he cared for the children at home. “Pizzy, you are going to be great at this,” he told her, encouraging the role swap. They have continued alternating reserve service ever since.

Her story appears in “Luchotzot,” a new book by author Ayelet Dekel, created with the Hachalutz movement and built from 20 interviews with women soldiers and reservists. Dekel said many women initially insisted they had “no real story,” but the interviews revealed what she described as a quiet revolution of women in combat, accelerated by the manpower needs of the current war. She said 21% of the IDF’s combat force is now women, and one-third of its medical force is women, including doctors, medics and paramedics who remain in reserve service because they are still needed.

Refeld Blot also served while pregnant. In her second reserve cycle that summer, she and Pizzy decided to have another child. She said the pregnancy and reserves came from the same instinct, that life must continue after injury and that if her husband could not defend the country, she would. At first she kept serving at Brigade 35 while suffering from nausea, then, back with Brigade 646 as it prepared for a Lebanon maneuver, she could no longer button her uniform and told her commander she was pregnant and would be on partial duty. Her service ended only in her eighth month, when her brigade moved from the Lebanon front to the Syrian border.