RAMAT GAN—Wounded in Gaza battle, Capt. Itamar Shapira faced six surgeries and a long recovery.
True, he was in one of the world’s best hospitals. But it’s not just about medical care.
Soldiers go through long nights, plagued by pain and also dreams or torment about what they underwent, he told The Epoch Times.
“So they need their families with them,” he said.
His was close by, supported by a charity normally helping families of cancer-stricken children.
Rachashei Lev—its name means “Whispers of the Heart”—found itself thrust into war by Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
“I understood I could not sit in my chair and wait for the state,” its CEO, Shimi Geshayed, told The Epoch Times through a translator.
“I needed to make a shift in the business. A shift from children with cancer, a shift to soldiers.”
The Israeli government was partially paralyzed by the attack.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet moved quickly to declare war and mobilize reserve troops.
But the nation couldn’t deal as quickly with homefront challenges: hundreds of thousands of evacuated citizens needing food, shelter, clothing, or medical care.
Businesses and farms were suddenly short of labor.
Air travel halted.
People were worried about missing friends and relatives.
Others were stunned that their nation’s formidable defenses had somehow let them down.
“This is not easy for me to say,” Mr. Geshayed said. “I’m Israeli. For me, the flag is holy. These are the most wonderful people in the world.
“But on Oct. 7 the state of Israel went down. And the people of Israel rose up. The mechanisms of the state shut down, they didn’t work. And the people of Israel rose to the occasion.”
He doesn’t see his group’s shift as all that big. The soldiers are the nation’s children as well. “They are taking the risk for everyone.”
Founded in 1989, Rachashei Lev works with two hospitals, Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, and Ichilov in nearby Tel Aviv.
It’s similar to Ronald McDonald House. Children’s families can stay there as a home base during long treatment regimens. Parents can do laundry, host birthday parties, or get sorely needed relaxation with massages and mani-pedis.
Shimi Geshayed, CEO of the Rachashei Lev Family Support Center for children with cancer in Ramat Gan, Israel, with one of the center's patients. Courtesy of Rachashei Lev.
Right on hospital grounds, it’s got an advantage over its American counterpart, its vice president of foreign relations, Orna Shalomoff, told The Epoch Times.
Sick children still being treated can come from the hospital without being discharged to see their parents, eat pizza, or play video games, all things that help ease their discomfort.
Mr. Geshayed said he cleared the charity’s schedule and talked to army doctors about what they needed.
It takes an hour and 50 minutes to get a wounded soldier from Gaza to the trauma units at Israel’s best hospitals.
The doctor, meanwhile, “doesn’t have an ultrasound to see what’s going on internally. He doesn’t have a camera. He doesn’t have a monitor for vital statistics.”
So, Mr. Geshayed said: “I’m going to bring the trauma room into Gaza, to the battlefield.”
He and Ms. Shalomoff raised more than 6 million Israeli shekels, around $2 million, over the next three months for high-tech mobile medical equipment.
“We understood what was missing and got it as quickly as possible. I understood I could not wait in my chair for the state.”
“The organization [also] understood it needed to get ‘under the stretcher,’” an Israeli expression for “pitching in.”
Providing support for the soldiers and their families became a priority: Places to sleep, food, laundry, personal services, plus extras like barbecues and entertainment.
“You understand that you have to give everything: Emotional and moral support, and you don’t know how long it will last.”
‘I Had To Stay With My Guys’
Capt. Shapira, 26, a computer science student at Bar Ilan University, belongs to a reserve unit of about 36 combat engineers who accompany tanks into battle.On Oct. 7, he was at his parents’ home for the Sabbath. He tried to allay his mother’s fear as he reported by telling her he was taking his laptop and would study for upcoming exams.
“I did not study,” he told The Epoch Times.
Instead, his unit readied within the required three days. They were positioned on the Gaza frontier where they waited almost three weeks. The ground invasion began on Oct. 27.
Combat engineers demolish tunnels, buildings, and other infrastructure. They go in first, opening roads so demolition units can locate terror tunnels, destroy them and disarm booby traps.
The tanks advanced on roads likely mined or booby-trapped, he said. The engineers had to clear them or bulldoze new roads.
They succeeded, he said, despite facing more and better-armed troops than expected. The success built their confidence. He talked about soldiers’ mindset.
“Sometimes it’s not that great, right? Sometimes, you’re stuck in traffic. Like you would be in Manhattan, only it’s a hostile neighborhood.
Capt. Itamar Shapira of the IDF (L) with two of his platoon mates signing an Israeli flag for the family of a comrade killed in action in Gaza. Courtesy of Rachashei Lev.
“You have nowhere to go with your vehicle. And they’re shooting rockets at you, or RPGs. They’re shooting mortars at you, and you have nowhere to go.”
They found tunnels everywhere without looking too hard. They once found four in an hour, he said.
In a grueling battle on Nov. 2, they wrested a school compound from Hamas.
His platoon took significant damage, shot at from ranges as close as five meters. His own vehicle was hit by two RPGs.
“It was a very tough night. But I must say every battle we have with Hamas terrorists ends with the IDF getting the upper hand. It’s amazing to see the professionalism of the IDF soldiers.”
Hamas, he said, “has tunnels everywhere. They’ve been preparing for this moment probably since we left the Gaza Strip in 2005.”
After the school battle, his unit was ordered to stand down to fix their vehicles.
“We had many guys that were injured. I had three fractures in my arm.” He showed the reporter one of his wounds. His vehicle’s hatch had closed on his hand the day before.
“It was very painful. I had to stay with my guys.”
Capt. Itamar Shapira shows off a piece of shrapnel taken out of his body after he was wounded fighting in Gaza on Nov. 3, 2023. Dan M. Berger/The Epoch Times
His guys wanted him to take care of his wounds, he said, “Because I can’t fire the gun, I can’t do anything.” He told them he could manage for a few days.
The unit headed west toward the beach, arriving there at 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 3, their eighth day in Gaza. He'd been 48 hours without sleep.
“I was exhausted. But the mood became very good. Because, you know, soldiers like cigarettes and chocolates. We got those things and it was amazing.”
He said they could leave their vehicles to relieve themselves—“It’s a privilege, really”—and sleep outside for the first time in Gaza.
“I slept on this beautiful beach, on the sand. I was like, I don’t care. Tonight, I’m sleeping good.”
He “slept good” for an hour and a half before waking to mortar fire. They got back into their German-made Puma fighting vehicle. They went back to sleep but an hour later the vehicle took a direct hit.
He woke up to screaming. “It’s a big mess. The smell of the blood, the ash, the screaming.”
He didn’t know if he was smelling his own blood or someone else’s. He was still half asleep. He saw his own arm bleeding.
“I looked to my left. I saw someone’s chest was not moving, someone’s chest with a big [piece of] shrapnel in his heart” and his neck unnaturally curved.
He assumed the man died immediately but looked at his face to confirm it. Only then did he realize who it was: a man with two daughters.
Past him, he saw another man, severely injured and screaming, with injured legs and belly. He and a sergeant pulled him out through a hatch that still worked and applied a tourniquet.
“Then I looked for one for myself.”
He wondered if he was bleeding, if so if it had hit a main artery, and if he was going to die. He then realized it wasn’t his blood.
His unit had already lost two men wounded. Of the remaining six, three were uninjured, one killed, he himself wounded, and the other man more severely so.
A female paramedic ran to help them. He limped towards her, his ankle fractured and Achilles tendon torn.
“We told her there were injured guys inside. She was, like, ‘No, I’m taking you.’ My commander got the other guy. They took him to Israel real fast, like in 10 minutes maybe.” The man is doing well now, Capt. Shapira said.
Capt. Shapira evacuated within an hour, undergoing six surgeries over the next three months. He shows a reporter a piece of shrapnel they took out of him. “It’s beautiful.”
While he’s been at Sheba Hospital, Rachashei Lev has helped him with appointments and rides. His family hasn’t stayed there. They can stay in his own nearby apartment but the center helps with any number of things. It can pay for extras not covered by military health care.
He talked about his sleepless nights.
“You see images. I think about when I did the tourniquet to my guy. I’m thinking, I wonder if the other guy [who Capt. Shapira thought was dead] was still alive. I mean, he knows I’m not trying to help him, only helping the other guy.”
He was working right above the dead man’s body to reach the wounded man.
“That’s haunted me. Sometimes soldiers have [bad] dreams, right? So they need their families with them.”
Rachashei Lev makes that possible. It’s a godsend for soldiers whose families don’t live nearby, he said.
“And they want to come to this hospital [Sheba]. It’s the best hospital in Israel, for sure, one of the best in the world.”
Newsweek magazine ranks Sheba ninth best hospital in the world this year, the highest ranked outside North America and Europe, according to Ms. Shalomoff.
‘She Knows I’m, You Know, Crazy’
Maya Regev, 21, was released as a hostage after 50 days. Her brother Itay, 18, also a hostage, was released four days later. Both came to Sheba for surgery. Their families stayed at Rachashei Lev as well.On March 5, the day her father Ilan Regev spoke to The Epoch Times, Ms. Regev addressed the Knesset.
“I came here to cry out for the hostages left behind. The same cry I let out when I was being abducted,” she told Israel’s parliament.
Her father played for a reporter a chilling tape of his last conversation with her after she'd been shot and just before her abduction, screaming from the Nova Music Festival.
Ilan Regev (R) with son Itay (L) and daughter Maya (C) after Mr. Regev's children were released from Hamas captivity in late November. Courtesy of Rachashei Lev
Ms. Regev on April 2 told a Knesset committee about female hostages’ sexual abuse by their Hamas captors.
She must take antibiotics for a year for infections left by botched surgery during her captivity, Ms. Shalomoff said.
Mr. Regev told The Epoch Times he'd picked his children up at the airport late Oct. 6 from a vacation. They pit-stopped at home, then went directly to the Nova festival.
His younger son Guy, 14, told him early on Saturday that rocket attacks had begun. Maya texted they were heading home.
Then on TV he saw video from an Israeli police car, of Hamas men in white pickup trucks attacking the border town of Sderot.
“I am in shock when I see it,” he said. He called his daughter for the first time.
Malki Shem-Tov (L) and Shelly Shem-Tov (R) discuss their son Omer's Oct. 7, 2023 kidnapping during an interview from their home in Tel Aviv, Israel on April 4, 2024. Tal Atzmon/Screenshot via NTD
“She told me, ‘Father, everything is okay. We are going home. The police are here. Don’t worry.”
He hadn’t realized the festival was so close to the border and asked her to send him a location.
She called him back at 8:47 a.m. He recorded the call.
“It’s not easy [to listen to],” he cautioned the reporter.
The screaming and hysteria tell the story even if you don’t speak Hebrew.
A translator put it into English for The Epoch Times.
“Daddy, they shot me! Daddy, they shot me!” Maya Regev screams into the phone.
“She was saying, ”Daddy, I love you. I love you. They kill me,'” Ilan Regev recalled.
“This was the last time I heard from my child.”
He did the only thing Ilan Regev could consider doing: he got into his car and started driving toward the festival near Gaza to bring back his children.
The police barred him from the area. It was too dangerous. He visited hospitals to see if they were there.
“I’m thinking all the time they’re dead, after this phone call.”
Late that night the children’s mother sent him a Hamas video.
“In the video, I see Itay in the back of a truck with Omer [Shem Tov], a friend of Maya and Itay.”
A sign calling for the release of hostage Omer Shem Tov is seen on October 20, 2023, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Leon Neal/Getty Images
There had been four young people together in the car. Three were kidnapped.
In the video, Mr. Regev saw only Itay and Omer. The fourth, Ori, was a friend of Omer’s who had been ferrying people from the party. He picked up the three, and then they were shot.
That was when Mr. Regev got Maya’s screaming phone call.
The truck video showed them en route to Gaza, he said. Their faces were blurred, but his ex-wife recognized Itay from the white shirt he was wearing.
“All this time I thought he was dead, and he’s alive,” Mr. Regev said. “So, I said, thank God he’s alive. I felt a little smile on my face. Because I know he’s alive. But it’s a bit absurd because he was taken by Hamas.”
The IDF confirmed on Oct. 9 that Maya had been kidnapped. They didn’t know if she was still alive, Mr. Regev said.
“From this moment, I tried to do everything.”
The Israeli foreign ministry asked him to lobby the hostage issue in London, France, or Italy. He chose Italy.
In Rome, he talked to the Vatican. He talked to the Italian president, prime minister, defense minister, transportation minister, and parliament. He talked to the mayor of Rome.
He played the recording of his daughter’s phone conversation. The president told him she'd do everything possible and knew Hamas was a terrorist organization.
“I want them to do everything to give us signs of life, for all 240 kidnap [victims]. Because the Red Cross doesn’t do anything.”
“I told [the Israeli foreign minister] I want to go to Geneva and talk with the Red Cross.”
Mr. Regev accompanied a foreign ministry delegation to Geneva, also joined by health officials and other hostage families.
He got in the face of an unsympathetic Red Cross official. She said the Israelis, who were sending them a lot of emails, should just let them work.
“I’m sorry, but I got angry, and I [stood] up and I go to her ... I tell her, ‘I want you to feel what I feel as a father who doesn’t know what’s happened to his child.
“After you hear this phone call,' and I let her hear the recording. And she stood like this. She’s like ice. It was amazing.
“And I got very angry” because she wasn’t doing anything.
“‘We want to know what happened to Maya and to all the other 200 kidnapped [hostages]. And you don’t tell us nothing. What do you want from me?’ ”
In early November, he said, the Army told him Maya might be alive, but not how they knew.
Israeli rescue workers work to remove dead bodies from near a destroyed police station that was the site of a battle following a mass infiltration by Hamas shooters from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, on Oct. 11, 2023. Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters
Maya, they would later learn, had two serious bullet wounds. One shattered a bone in her leg.
She was tied up in a tunnel for several hours and then taken to an apartment. She received surgery on the eighth day, receiving only one painkilling pill in the meantime.
The surgeon set her bones in the wrong position. Israeli surgeons would later refracture the leg to reset it properly. It’s a long and painful process, Mr. Regev said.
Maya managed to get surgery from a murderous terrorist group because he said: “She knew how to talk to them.”
“She’s a very smart girl. A strong girl. And she understood that her way was to talk them through it,” Ms. Shalomoff said.
She had a female teacher watching her around the clock and a male Hamas doctor. She kept demanding how her brother was doing. Finally, her guards brought a message from him. And the guards took messages between them.
Maya was inwardly terrified, he said. They had torn off most of her clothing and taken all her jewelry.
The doctor, while changing her bandage, stroked her leg up and down, her father said.
There was a family in the next room with a small child, 3 or 4 years old.
“They opened the door and let him come to see her, like a monkey. Look at her. See how the Jew looks.”
After her release, he said, she was first afraid to talk. “They played with her head all the time,” he said.
But after her brother was released, “She said a lot of things. She was like a sponge. She remembered everything she heard,” he said, including names and numbers.
Her best friend, Omer Shem Tov, 21, is still held hostage, Ms. Shalomoff said. He was with Itay Regev all 54 days of Itay’s captivity, she said.
In February there was a dinner of thanksgiving for Maya and Itay’s return.
An hour before, Ms. Shalomoff said, Maya didn’t want to go: “Because ‘I don’t want to say thank you when there’s [still] other hostages.’ ”
She relented after Omer’s mother encouraged her to go through with it, Mr. Regev said.
“It was very hard for her,” Ms. Shalomoff said. “Everyone prayed for Omer’s release and the other hostages.”
Mr. Regev heard on Nov. 24 of her imminent release. She was released the next day.
He saw her first at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba. Itay was released four days later and brought to Soroka to see Maya.
Mr. Regev acknowledges he is a lucky man.
“I believe. I believe in God. I believed all the time that they were alive and that I would get them back.”
And his son believed it the whole time as well. Mr. Regev said he'd taught his son the value of believing in himself. Itay got a “Believe” tattoo when he was 16.
“If you want to do something and you believe it, go for it. Don’t be afraid. Just do what you feel in your stomach.”
“All the time he believed he would be released.”
When Maya crossed the Israeli border, she made a phone call before she got to the hospital.
“The first thing she said was, ‘Where’s Daddy? Is Daddy okay? Did something happen to him?’ She asked this because she knew after the [Oct. 7] phone call that I’m not going to stay [home].”
“The first thing I'd do is to try to go to release her. And she knows this because she knows I’m, you know, crazy.
“So she’s scared that something happened to me, and I’m now dead. Because if I was getting inside [the combat area] and the police don’t stop me, who knows what happens.”
Maya’s treatments continued, she was in a good frame of mind, and getting out sometimes with friends, he said.
Itay was shot also. The bullet was removed by a Hamas veterinarian with no anesthesia, Mr. Regev said. No longer in the hospital, he takes daily martial arts lessons from a friend of Mr. Regev’s.
Maya had to cancel a scheduled address to the United Nations when she contracted an infection, he said.
However, the Israeli ambassador brought other ambassadors to Tel Aviv to speak with Maya. They all thought the entire body needed to hear her, Ms. Shalomoff said.
On April 2, showing her father’s in-your-face style, she scolded the Knesset for going ahead with a six-week recess despite the continuing war.
She'd rescue them herself, the Times of Israel reported she said, “but that’s the job of the country that let us down, and you’re still going on vacation.”
Mr. Regev agreed that with his “Die Hard” style he was an excellent father for someone taken hostage.
“I'll do everything. I’m crazy. I don’t care. I tried to find other ways to bring my daughter back. I don’t even want to think about what I had planned in my mind.”
