Wife of wounded reservist swaps roles and serves at the front while pregnant

Captain (res.) Roni Refeld Blot tells the extraordinary story of how her family’s roles flipped after her husband, nicknamed Pitzi, was critically wounded by a bullet to the head on October 9, 2023, in the Lebanon border sector, two days after the Hamas attack. Pitzi, a team commander in the brigade commander’s headquarters of Brigade 300, was also at the scene where one of his soldiers was killed. Refeld Blot recalls being asked at the hospital entrance whether she was there for the wounded or the dead, and realizing she had reached a turning point. Their family then entered a long, exhausting rehabilitation process, and when he returned home after about a month, she became his caregiver while raising their three children.

In interviews collected for Ayelet Dekel’s book “Women Fighters,” Refeld Blot says that after nearly five months of intensive rehab, Pitzi regained independence. By February 2024, while the war was still raging, she told him, “There is no way there is no one in this house serving in reserve duty.” She called his brothers, eventually found a role, and moved from her previous position as a company commander at Havat HaShomer to serving as a battalion operations NCO in the Paratroopers. For about a year she served in the same Lebanon border sector where her husband had been wounded, while he stayed home with the children.

Refeld Blot says she had never even seen a command post before and was under extreme stress, but her husband encouraged her, telling her she would be excellent at it because she had already managed a household under crisis. She says they have been “swapping” ever since, with one of them in reserve duty while the other stays home. Dekel says her book, based on 20 first-person monologues from women who served during the war, is meant as a female version of “The War of the Sons” and reflects what she calls a quiet revolution of women in combat.

Dekel says many of the women told her they had “no real story,” even when they had served in Gaza, Lebanon, or Syria, and she argues that the current war exposed a major shift in women’s military roles. She says women now make up 21% of the IDF combat force and one-third of its medical force, which helps explain why female doctors, medics, and paramedics remain in reserve service. She also notes that many women had to push hard to get into reserve duty, often starting in support roles before returning to combat positions.

Refeld Blot also describes becoming pregnant during reserve service. She says the pregnancy began during her second reserve round, and in the middle of preparations for a Lebanon maneuver she could not button her uniform and told her commander she would serve in “half B.” She later arrived in civilian clothes at her unit and says the response was warm. She adds that serving while pregnant was difficult because of nausea, night shifts, body armor, and the fear of seeming unfit, but she believes the break was beneficial because it also brought her home to her children. Her reserve service ended only in her eighth month, when her brigade was moved from Lebanon to the Syrian border.