Bereaved Medic Returns to Volunteer and Treats Fallen Soldier’s Nephew
Two years and four months after her son Rotem was killed in Gaza, Lia Sahar Hader returned to volunteer as a medic with United Hatzalah and was met on her first shift by a deeply emotional scene. She was dispatched to Rehovot to evacuate a sick baby to a hospital, only to discover that the child was being taken from the home of a grieving family sitting shiva for Staff Sgt. Ahad Yaari, a Givati Brigade soldier who had recently fallen, and that the baby was his nephew.
Lia said she felt as though the two fallen soldiers were beside her in the ambulance. “I felt in the ambulance that the two fallen soldiers were by my side,” she said, adding that Rotem and Ahad, whose nephew Beni was the patient, seemed to have orchestrated the encounter. “They sent a great light, in the evacuation of the baby to the hospital,” she said.
The shift began at 5 p.m. in the Rehovot and Shfela area and did not pause for a break until about 10 p.m., after a nonstop stream of calls, Lia recalled. The baby’s mother was waiting outside the building, visibly distraught. Only after they arrived did she explain that she had just come from the home where the family was sitting shiva for Ahad, the younger brother of her husband, Amitai.
Beni’s mother, Naama Yaari, said the ambulance ride to the hospital brought both women to tears. She said they felt that Rotem and Ahad had brought them together through the baby. Rotem, the eldest of five siblings, served as a medic in the Paratroopers Reconnaissance Unit and fought from October 7 in the Gaza border communities and later in Gaza. Lia said he was wounded fatally in Khan Younis after throwing himself on a grenade to shield another soldier, then continued moving toward a Namer armored vehicle while supported by comrades and worrying about the wounded around him. The family from Moshav Kfar Aviv had raised him on the values of giving and volunteer work, and he had planned to join his mother’s ambulance shifts after his military discharge.
