Sharon and Eyal Eshel, the parents of Roni, an IDF observer who was murdered by Hamas terrorists together with her peers on October 7th, testified on Tuesday before the Civilian Commission of Inquiry, an unofficial civilian initiative to investigate the events of October 7th. Sharon Eshel recounted: "Six or seven days after the disaster, we encountered a post by an IDF officer, I'm embarrassed to say that she's an officer, a Golani Brigade operations officer who wrote a heart-wrenching post which was only meant to glorify herself, and there she writes that she was in the operations room and managed to escape, and anyone who didn't manage to escape burned. The IDF spokesman also posted it on his page. I ask: is that how parents are supposed to learn that their daughters were burnt alive in the operations room? From some officer's post? "Inside the operations room, there were four officers and two soldiers from Golani. They escaped through the window and left the girls behind. Where do you hear that IDF officers escape first and leave behind female soldiers, abandoning them? We don't understand how those officers are still serving in the IDF and the Military Police haven't opened an investigation against them for abandonment," the mother added. "The abandonment here by that operations officer is twofold since when my daughter stood in the operations room and begged that she let the observers in and not leave them in the temporary shelter, she ignored her and didn't do so. And the second time that she abandoned them was when she was first to escape through the window. All the answers that we got were, 'There was chaos, there was smoke, it was dark, they couldn't see.' These answers are unacceptable. We want a very clear Military Police investigation, like the IDF knows how to investigate, and to understand if this is our military. Is this our military, where officers are the first to flee the scene?" she wondered. Roni's father, Eyal, his voice breaking, described what one of the soldiers who managed to escape said: "One of them came close to the window and recounts how he heard their cries from outside, he heard their last cries, until their voices fell silent. And that sentence, in the end, I as Roni's father, every one of the fathers is a father to a daughter burnt alive because of other people's failures. Since if we're going to speak the truth, this is also the truth. A soldier stands there and hears girls crying from a burning operations room, until their voices fall silent. That is so haunting, so unfathomable, how many failures happened here, and in the end, during the days after October 7th, the parents of the observers had to sit and read a post by an officer who herself is still serving in the IDF."
