Three Wounded Soldiers, a Prosthetic Leg and a Wedding Glass

Three soldiers wounded in the fighting that followed the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 spoke in Jerusalem about what came after their injuries. Each carries visible scars and the loss of comrades; each has spent the years since rebuilding.

Daniel V., from Petah Tikva in central Israel, was 21 and had just finished medic training with the Golani infantry brigade when the attack began. Inside a disabled armoured personnel carrier near Kibbutz Nir Am, close to the Gaza boundary, he worked to save the men around him. When a grenade landed inside the vehicle his comrade Matan Abergil threw himself on it, saving the crew and losing his life. Daniel treated the wounded under fire, opened an emergency hatch to vent gas and kept his men alive until rescue reached them. Afterwards, he said, the silence was the hardest part; the nights were long and empty and the sounds of the day kept returning. He found a way forward through others who had survived. "Maybe because I had accepted death," he said, "I learned how to live."

Tom H., also of Golani, woke that morning to rocket fire and realised he was the most senior soldier still standing at his border outpost. Wearing an undershirt and a vest, he and his friend Binyamin armed an armoured personnel carrier with a 37-kilogram gun, drove through fire to defend Nir Am and shielded trapped comrades until reinforcements arrived. What followed was sleeplessness, guilt and the sense that survival needed justifying. Recovery began in small steps, through adaptive sport and group activity. "It wasn't just football," he said. "It was breathing again."

Boris S. was born in Ukraine and immigrated to Israel at 12. He served in Duvdevan, an elite unit, and rushed home from Japan to rejoin it when the war began. On 10 November, in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, an explosion killed four of his friends and took his leg. On 22 July 2025, aged 27, he stood under a wedding canopy in Jerusalem; when the time came to break the glass he raised his prosthetic leg and brought it down. Two months later, on Hoshana Rabbah during the festival of Sukkot, he told his story to a room of new immigrants.

What the unit names mean

Duvdevan (the word means "cherry" in Hebrew) is Unit 217 of the Israel Defense Forces' Commando Brigade, an undercover counter-terrorism unit founded in June 1986 whose members operate in civilian clothing in populated areas, according to a reference account of the unit. Golani is one of the army's main infantry brigades. Both were heavily engaged along the Gaza boundary on the first day of the war.

The scale behind three stories

The original account says that in two years of war more than 20,000 Israeli soldiers were injured, half of them under 30. Official figures have climbed steadily. The Defence Ministry's Rehabilitation Department reported taking in 10,056 wounded personnel in the first ten months of the war, about 35 per cent of them with post-traumatic stress or other trauma-related conditions and roughly 37 per cent with limb injuries, with some 68 per cent reservists, the Times of Israel reported in August 2024. By March 2025 the figure had reached about 16,000 wounded soldiers, including 72 amputees fitted with prosthetic limbs, the same paper reported. More than 25,000 wounded Israelis have since entered the rehabilitation system, and the ministry projects about 100,000 people in its care by 2028, roughly half of them with psychological injuries, Ynet reported.

The charity in the middle of the story

Belev Echad ("with one heart" in Hebrew) is a New York-based non-profit founded by Rabbi Uriel Vigler and his wife, Shevy, of the Chabad movement. It was founded in 2009, ran its first trip bringing wounded Israeli soldiers to New York the following year and registered as a non-profit in 2017; it also keeps a residence near Tel Aviv with therapy facilities, visits soldiers in hospital and helps them with medical and career support, according to the Times of Israel in 2022 and eJewishPhilanthropy, which reported in November 2023 that the organisation raised $4.3 million at a Manhattan gala weeks after the war began. The charity describes its work as filling gaps in state care rather than replacing it.

"When we met Boris, we didn't see an amputee; we saw a whole soul," Rabbi Vigler said. "Seeing him stand under the chuppah was a victory for every wounded heart in Israel." Shevy Vigler said the organisation was not about what the soldiers had lost but about what still shone in them. Linda Pardes-Friedburg, chief executive of Shishi Shabbat Yisraeli, a grassroots initiative connecting Russian-speaking immigrants with Israeli life and volunteering, said that when a new immigrant hears a soldier say he lost a leg but not his future, it gives them an anchor in the country.

What is still unclear

Two of the three men are identified only by a first name and an initial, and the account does not explain why; Israeli reporting on serving and recently discharged soldiers is often restricted. No medical details, unit confirmations or dates of discharge were provided for any of them, and the casualty figure quoted in the original account is not sourced to a named body.