Two years without closure

“He fought until his last breath.” That’s how Yaffa Rudaeff remembers her husband, Lior, who on the morning of October 7 left their safe room in Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak and walked toward the sound  of gunfire. Nearly two years later, his body is still in Gaza, held by Hamas terrorists.

This Rosh Hashanah, while families across Israel gather to celebrate, Yaffa waits - not for miracles, but for the chance to bury her husband. “Knowing he’s gone doesn’t ease the pain,” she says. “It just shifts the focus of the struggle. Now it’s about bringing him back for a burial. That’s what we’re fighting for.”

Lior was 61, a father of four and a grandfather, a man whose world revolved around wheels. He was a mechanic, a transportation safety officer, a cyclist, a motorcyclist, and an ambulance driver.

“Cars, motorcycles, tractors, you name it, he drove it,” Yaffa recalls. “He probably had a license for everything except ships or planes. He loved anything with wheels.”

The couple’s story began in the early 1980s. They first met while visiting a wounded friend during the First Lebanon War, then reconnected by chance on the only bus from Tel Aviv to the Negev. “We sat next to each other, started talking, and that was it,” Yaffa says gently. They married in 1985 and raised their four children - Noam, Nadav, Bar, and Ben - in the open fields of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak.

For nearly forty years, Lior also served on the kibbutz emergency response team. He volunteered as ambulance driver, often waking in the middle of the night to help, then heading straight to work. “Others couldn’t handle that kind of dedication, but he did it for decades,” Yaffa says. “That’s who he was.”

On October 7, 2023, that dedication cost him his life.

When the sirens began just after dawn, Lior and Yaffa moved quickly into their safe room. Their relief was immediate - their children and grandchildren, who had planned to visit, had canceled at the last moment.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘Thank God they’re not here,’” Yaffa remembers.

A few minutes later, Lior handed her a cup of coffee, opened the weapons safe, and put on his gear. “I could see he was tense,” she says. “He knew something I didn’t.”

Twenty minutes after the attack began, he left the house. Before going, they spoke briefly about their youngest son, Ben, who was at the Nova music festival. Yaffa told him, “Go. Do what you need to do. I’ll deal with Ben.”

For the next five hours, Yaffa and her children scrambled to save Ben. His car was riddled with bullets, forcing him and a friend to flee on foot until they reached safety at a military base. Relief came only when she knew he was safe. Then came a deeper dread: Lior was no longer answering calls.

“It just wasn’t him,” she says. “It made no sense that he wasn’t checking on us, or on Ben. That’s when I knew something terrible had happened.”

Fragments of testimony later revealed what occurred. At the kibbutz gate, Lior and his friend Tal Haimi confronted dozens of armed terrorists alone. For nearly half an hour, they held them off, preventing Nir Yitzhak from suffering the horrors that engulfed neighboring communities.

“They were just two men against an army,” Yaffa says quietly. “Even after Lior was wounded, he kept fighting. He tried twice to drag Tal out under heavy fire. In the end, he had no choice but to fall back. That was the last anyone saw of him.”

For seven months, the family lived in torment, hoping he had been taken alive. Lior was listed as missing, then “likely kidnapped.” Only in May 2024 did the army confirm he had been killed that morning, based on intelligence from Gaza.

“It was a shock,” Yaffa says. “We still had hope, even though we knew the odds. But at least we knew he wasn’t suffering. That gave us some peace.”

Her youngest son put words to their relief: “This is the first night I’ll sleep properly,” he told her, knowing his father hadn’t endured captivity.

For Yaffa and her children, the battle now is not to bring Lior back alive - but to bring him back at all. “We don’t want a military operation to recover his body,” she says firmly. “Lior would have been the first to say: don’t risk soldiers for me. Save the living first. Only a deal will bring them home.”

The past year has left her with despair and anger. “We feel like we’ve been deserted,” she says. “The people of Israel are with us, you see it in the rallies, the thousands in the streets, but the government isn’t. Every morning, I wake up and ask myself: what else can I do to break through the indifference?”

When asked what justice looks like, Yaffa’s voice sharpens. “First, end this war. Please. What are we even fighting for? Last night, I couldn’t sleep because of the explosions. Living like this isn’t normal.”

Her message is simple: end the war, retrieve the hostages, and rebuild the destroyed communities. “People returned here. They didn’t give up. Three kibbutzim still haven’t come back. We need all the resources for rebuilding, not more fighting.”

As the Jewish High Holidays approach, her plea remains urgent: “Bring them home. Enough. Then, help us rebuild.”

Yaffa is not the only widow of a fallen fighter who is waiting to bury her husband. Five other women in Israel share the same tragic reality: husbands killed on October 7, whose bodies remain in the hands of terrorists in Gaza. They include Ela Haimi, widow of Tal Haimi; Hadas Adar, widow of Tamir Adar; Saphir Zohav Hamami, widow of Col. Asaf Hamami; and Amna Alatrash and Ktimal Alatrash, both widows of Sergeant Major Muhammad Alatrash.

Together they form a quiet sisterhood - waiting not for life to be restored, but for the chance to return their loved ones to Israel and lay them to rest with dignity.

“October 7 has not ended for them,” said IDFWO CEO Shlomi Nahumson. “For Yaffa and the five other widows, every day still carries the weight of that day – until the bodies of their loved ones are finally brought home.”

Lior lived his life in constant motion – on tractors, ambulances, and motorcycles – and his final act was one of unwavering bravery.

For Yaffa, hope endures: that by the time these words are read, her husband will already be back in Israel, laid to rest in the land he cherished so deeply.

This article was written in collaboration with IDF Widows & Orphans Organization (IDFWO).