Letters From Gaza

Sergeant Itay Amar was nineteen when he fell in combat in the southern Gaza Strip in June 2024, along with seven of his peers. After receiving his locked iPhone among his belongings, his mother, Lorin, tried to open it, insisting he must have left some kind of message behind. “He left one . . . I know my son. That’s what he was like his whole life, keeping me posted. It couldn’t be that he’d go in and not leave anything behind. It wouldn’t be grandiose, maybe just one sentence, but it would be there.”

Eventually Lorin got into the phone, and found a short last note: “Stay happy for me.” The words comforted her and the rest of Itay’s family and were engraved on his tombstone.

Like most armies, the IDF does not require soldiers to write letters of farewell to their families before entering combat. Still, these letters are written, on scraps of paper, unsent emails, or Google documents.

In 2024, copywriter Shlomo Kavas and journalist Racheli Palant-Rozen decided to collect and preserve these notes, working with researchers to contact each fallen soldier’s family. The result was If You’re Reading These Words, a book of forty-nine letters presented largely unedited, with notes explaining the context of each letter: inside jokes, family legends, quotations from songs, poems, and the Bible. Each letter is introduced with a brief biography of the soldier, a record of how they fell in combat, and an artist’s sketch of their face in blue and white. President Isaac Herzog wrote the Foreword, and interspersed throughout are essays by a wide range of Israeli public figures, from freed hostage Emily Damari and Fauda creator Avi Issacharoff to spiritual influencer Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi and singer-songwriter Eviatar Banai, offering their own kind of running narrative of tragedy and hope.

The book was first published in Hebrew in 2025 and was an immediate bestseller. Comedian and journalist Hanoch Daum called it “one of the most important war books ever published in Israel.” Daum himself gets a shoutout in one of the letters, from Yaron Chitiz, a soccer-loving twenty-three-year-old from an English-speaking family in Ra’anana. Chitiz writes: “what a special, surreal country… I feel privileged to take part in the country’s defense, even if I’m always complaining that my buns ache from sitting in the Namer (armored personnel carrier) for 40 hours straight.” He signs off with “Am Yisrael Chai” and “Don’t embarrass me and send this to Hanoch Daum.” His family didn’t listen, and his mother Debbie told me that finding his letter on Daum’s Facebook page was what first inspired the editors to create the volume.

One might expect a book like this to be unbearably heavy, and it is, but not because the letters are dark. It is because they are so often brilliant, funny, and perceptive, and the reader knows the whole time what the writers could not: how the story ends.

The letters even seem to anticipate this difficulty and redirect it. Rabbi Tamir Granot, a prominent rabbi and bereaved father from this war, notes in one interlude how the letters, like Moses’ final speech on Mount Nevo, take place at the “threshold between the present and eternity, the human and the divine.” Just as Moses tells the Israelites to “choose life,” these letters offer not a message of death or foreboding but a distillation of life. Shachar Friedman of Jerusalem, killed in the northern Gaza Strip at twenty-one, tells his parents: “I fought so that my family and friends and I could live! For you to live! Not for you to survive, not for you to breathe and exist, for you to live fully – so do it!”

If You’re Reading These Words isn’t just a collection of profiles in courage. It also offers intimate glimpses into ordinary lives, soldiers apologizing for recent spats with their parents, deciding which niece or nephew should get a laptop or a VR headset. Herman Wouk, in his introduction to The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu, famously wrote: “Heroes are not supermen; they are good men who embody, by the cast of destiny, the virtue of their whole people in a great hour.”

Elchanan Kalmanson was a forty-two-year-old father of five who displayed extraordinary courage on October 7th, racing into the Gaza Envelope from his hometown in the Hebron Hills with his brother and nephew to save 100 residents of Kibbutz Be’eri. His letter was found in a file on his computer entitled “If I Die,” written years earlier during his time working for the Mossad. He writes:

If I fall as a casualty in a war over the land, let them remember that this isn’t another war or another intifada or some other nonsense. This is the same long war over our country and our people’s identity that’s already been going on for nearly 150 years.

Mark Kononovich, a father of four from Herzliya, one of whose children goes to school with my son, was killed in the southern Gaza Strip at 35. He writes to his family: “One day, a sun-drenched morning or a late, rainy evening. You’ll suddenly realize that everything will happen to you when it needs to happen. And the people who are with you aren’t eternal, and the fact is that neither are you.”

The editors write that even as people accustomed to working with words, they found themselves speechless before some of these letters: “What even is this? This beauty? Who writes like this? So vulnerable, penetrating, singular, unlike anything else.”

The letter writers span a wide cross-section of Israeli society: religious Zionists, secular Tel Avivites, Russian immigrants, kibbutzniks, members of the Druze minority, and even an American Christian-raised soldier named Yonatan Haim, born Jonathan Dean, who wrote to his partner Najma: “look for me in the early first and the late rain.” Some of the most powerful letters eschew all flourish. Alon Sacagiu of Hadera, killed at twenty-two, writes: “I don’t relate to all the fancy words they publish about every soldier who dies, writing as if they’re Alterman, at the very least. I believe in deeds and putting things into action. Be doers, not talkers.”

Though the letters reflect a diversity of voices, two things are conspicuously absent. One is politics. Yossi Hershkovitz, a reserve officer, beloved Jerusalem high-school principal, and father of five who fell at forty-four, wrote: “How much slander has been said about this people this past year, and how much is it all lies and falsehood. We’re all here fighting shoulder to shoulder, all as one person with one heart, and the feeling is like we’re standing at Mount Sinai.”

The second absence is any preoccupation with Hamas or the Palestinians. These soldiers, as they describe it, fight for people they love, not against people they hate.

One oblique reference to the political situation comes from Ben Zussman, a young Jerusalem resident killed early in the war: “If the worst comes to pass and I fall captive, dead or alive, I am not willing for a soldier or civilian to be harmed because of any deal for my release… I am not willing for terrorists to be released in exchange for me.” He adds: “In no way, shape, or form. Please do not violate my words.”

Parts of this volume are filled with pure poetry, at times literally so, but the letters resist any single literary label. They are ethical wills and love letters, battlefield dispatches and philosophical meditations. Perhaps the closest analogue is the Hebrew genre of the tzava’ah, or ethical will, which began with the testaments left by Jacob, Joshua, and other Biblical figures at the threshold of death. Except that these letters were mostly written by people in their twenties, young men and women who assumed responsibility for their people and their land with their eyes wide open. Their testaments reach across the chasm of death to touch the hearts of their loved ones and ours, the nation that lives because of their sacrifice.