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Bereaved mother recalls speaking on phone to soldier son as terrorist shot him, incident filmed by Hamas

Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades filmed the incident of the sniper hitting Eyal Shynes while he was talking on the phone with his mother.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

The mother of slain IDF soldier Eyal Shynes told Army radio how she had been speaking to her son on the phone as a terrorist sniper shot him, an incident that was recorded on a Hamas video.

As Eyal Shynes was taking a break from fighting in Rafah, he spoke to his mother about his next visit, hoping to extend it to attend a concert.

Meirav Shynes described it as a “great conversation” that was stopped short when the shooting started.

“We spoke for a few minutes. He said he would be coming home and would be there July 8, and that he had asked his commander if he could extend it until Saturday to attend a concert,” the mother said, speaking through tears.

“And then suddenly I hear that they are shooting him, and that’s how the conversation ended. But we still heard everything and it was terrible,” she added.

At first, Meirav said she didn’t hear the shooting, and when she heard him call for his commander, she believed that he was injured but would survive.

“I didn’t really hear shooting, I heard him yell and call for his sergeant,” she said. “And when I heard him call for his sergeant, I was sure he was just injured.”

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She immediately contacted her son’s social services liaison officer to keep her informed about his condition.

“I was sure we would soon go looking for him in some hospital. I didn’t think I would be going to get [the bad] news,” she said.

As Meirav and her husband were driving towards Tel Aviv, they began to worry when they weren’t receiving any messages about where their son was being hospitalized.

“And then they asked if we were at home; then I really understood,” she said.

Eyal Shynes was in the Nahal Infantry Brigade’s 931st Battalion which had been fighting Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, who filmed the incident of the sniper hitting Shynes while he was talking on the phone with his mother.

In the video, he is hit and disappears, and other IDF soldiers are seen rushing to his aid.

He doesn’t appear to be wearing a helmet.

One explanation for the apparent laxity regarding the helmet is that he was interviewed by a journalist from Mispacha magazine just a day earlier, and the notion that a journalist was allowed in might have indicated that the situation was considered to be relatively safe.