According to Israel national news, Sharon and Eyal Eshel testified on Tuesday before the Civilian Commission of Inquiry, an unofficial initiative investigating the events of October 7th, when Roni and her peers were killed by Hamas terrorists.
Sharon Eshel recounted, "Six or seven days after the tragedy, we came across a post by an IDF officer—I'm ashamed to say she’s an officer, an operations officer from the Golani Brigade. In her heart-wrenching post, which seemed designed to glorify herself, she wrote that she was in the operations room and managed to escape, while those who couldn’t were left to burn. The IDF spokesman shared this as well. I ask: is this how parents are supposed to learn that their daughters were burned alive in the operations room? From some officer's post?"
She continued, "Inside the operations room, there were four officers and two Golani soldiers who escaped through the window, leaving the girls behind. How is it that IDF officers flee first and abandon female soldiers? We don’t understand how these officers are still serving in the IDF, and why the Military Police haven't opened an investigation into their abandonment."
"The abandonment by that operations officer is twofold. When my daughter begged to let the observers in and not leave them in temporary shelter, she ignored her. The second abandonment occurred when she was the first to escape through the window. The answers we received—'There was chaos, there was smoke, it was dark'—are unacceptable. We demand a clear Military Police investigation, as the IDF is capable of, to understand if this is the military we recognize. Are officers truly meant to be the first to flee the scene?" she questioned.
Roni’s father, Eyal, his voice breaking, shared a chilling account from one of the soldiers who escaped: "One soldier approached the window and recounted how he heard their cries from outside, heard their last cries until their voices fell silent. As Roni's father, I feel every father of those girls bears the grief of daughters burned alive due to others' failures. A soldier stood there, hearing girls cry from a burning operations room until they went silent. This is haunting and incomprehensible—so many failures occurred here. Yet, in the days after October 7th, the parents of the observers had to read a post from an officer still serving in the IDF."
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