On a fateful night in June of 2014, three boys were waiting at a bus stop looking for a ride. In Israel, it is very common and safe to hitchhike. These boys were Eyal Yifrach, age 19, Gilad Shaar, age 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, age 16. The two sixteen year-old boys had been away at school for two weeks and were finally going home to visit their families, sleep in their own beds, and eat their mothers’ home-cooked food. The third boy just happened to be at the wrong bus stop, at the wrong time, and on the wrong evening. On this night, a typically safe way to travel would result in a tragedy that would be felt in Israel for years to come.
Kidnapping of the Three Boys
After waiting for a ride, the three boys saw an Israeli car with two Jewish men approach them. What they didn’t know is that they were about to fall victim to a horrific crime. The two men who they had thought to be Jewish, were actually Palestinian-Arabs who had stolen an Israeli car and disguised themselves as Jews. Unfortunately, Arabs kidnapping Jews in order to negotiate for the release of terrorists from Israeli prisons has happened many times over the years. It is understood that this was the intention of the men who kidnapped these boys on that fateful night in 2014.
The heinous plan would soon go haywire for these terrorists. Shortly after getting into the stolen vehicle, the boys realized what had happened to them. They quietly managed to call the Israeli police to report what was happening to them. On the other end of the phone call, the operator heard rustling and then, soon after, the phone call dropped. No one ever heard anything else from the boys after this.
They conducted a desperate search for eighteen long days, but after a grim discovery, the missing pieces of information from that night became terribly clear. Authorities now believe that the terrorists panicked after discovering that the boys had called the police, thinking they were being followed. In reality, the terrorists were not being followed. It would only be several hours later that the country would realize what had happened. In this panicked state, the terrorists abandoned their plan to kidnap the boys and instead shot them in the backseat of the car. They then hid their bodies in a field where the authorities found them eighteen days later.
The Memorial in Honor of the Three Boys
To honor the memory of these boys, a memorial stands for them in Oz VeGaon, in Judea. In this memorial, a sign hangs that quotes Jeremiah 31:15 in Hebrew:
“Rachel is weeping for her children.”
The mother of this teenager expected to see her son on June 12, 2014, but instead, she had to bury him. These boys were the innocent victims of a discriminatory crime, these families were the subject of premature mourning, and the country’s sense of safety and security for their children was stolen.
How to Make a Stand So This Will Never Happen Again
Eyal, Gilad, and Naftali had long and joy-filled futures set before them, but instead of graduating, marrying, and raising children of their own, they were murdered. They were not murdered in revenge for a crime they had committed. These boys’ lives were stolen too soon.
Visiting their memorial allows us to take a stand against the possibility of such events happening again. Let us commit to never forgetting and to doing everything in our power to ensure that tragedies like this are never repeated.
