American-Israeli Yona Brief’s story is a stunning tale of perseverance, hope, and determination.
When you hear what he lived through, it reminds you of the Passover song “Dayenu,” which goes through a list of miraculous actions by God from the Bible, with the chorus after each line being “that would have been enough.”
Recently, the Magazine spoke with Israeli-Americans David and Hazel Brief, the parents of Yona, who died on November 27, 2024, after surviving two life-threatening ambushes in 2023 during his Duvdevan Special Forces service – one in Nur al Shams in the West Bank in May, and the other in Kfar Aza on Oct. 7.
“There was a lot of hope, and all the positive aspects of Israel came out,” his parents said.
“Yona was visited by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister Naftali Bennett, then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, then-IDF chief Herzi Halevi, educator and bereaved mother Miriam Peretz, and singers Yishai Rebo, Yoram Cohen, and Hanan Ben Ari,” Hazel said.
David noted that Yona especially connected with singer and actor Idan Amedi.
“We want to share with the public Yona’s fight to live,” Hazel affirmed. “He fought very, very hard to stay alive against all odds, and we were gifted with 417 days to spend together, whereas most parents get a ‘knock on the door’ announcing their child’s death.
“We got to have a ‘last conversation’ with him. I thought he was going to make it. It was incredibly painful to see your child go through horrific amputations. This was a kid who could not sit still. Every organ in his body failed at some point, but Yona kept coming back,” she said.
“We lost our son and had spent over a year in the hospital,” David said. “We felt we were the lucky ones. He was with us! Cognizant, communicative, smiling, and laughing; being optimistic about the rest of his life.”
“Thirteen bullets and 11 pneumonias take its toll. And then he had so many operations that his body reached the limit for what it could handle,” his bereaved father stated.
Continuing, Hazel declared, “He amazed everybody and touched everybody. It spoke to how much Yona defied all medical reason.”
At one point, MK Chili Tropper, now close to the Brief family, got an update from Sheba Medical Center director Yitshak Kreiss and returned to them to say, “They [the doctors] don’t know what they’re doing, but not in a bad way. Yona is just beyond medical books and knowledge. He has defied everything. They are in a state of awe and bewilderment.”
At a later stage, “the day before Yona died, Kreiss called again. They had gathered all the doctors who worked with Yona to go over his entire file. A friend, Mitch Schwabber, participated, and they all asked, ‘Is there anything else we can do in any of the disciplines?’ They answered, “There is nothing else we can do.”
“There were so many years of experience there… and they did not stop any of his medical treatments” – because none of them could say he was definitely going to die after he had defied expectations so many times.
“That was the deep faith that the staff had in Yona,” Hazel said.
First injury – May 2023, West Bank
Yona’s first injury while in Duvdevan was in May of 2023, when he was wounded by an exploding pipe bomb during a Duvdevan operation in Nur al Shams in northern Samaria.
“He was two and a half years into his service,” his mother said. “He was a combat medic, but had been given a medical discharge. He didn’t need to return. He asked, ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’ He talked to us and his friends. I said, ‘Definitely yes. Yona, we made aliyah – finish your service. You are not a quitter, you are part of your team.’ They really wanted him back. He is a good boy, never disrespectful, a hard worker. He did a year of Torah study in a mechina and then signed up for the full army service – no shortcuts,” she said.
Learning of Yona’s Oct. 7 wounds while visiting the US
David’s father fell while walking in his hometown of Chicago, so the Briefs decided to visit him and stay with him over Simchat Torah of 2023. Some of their other children were also overseas, so no other family members would have been home with them for what was supposed to be a joyous holiday.
“We left on October 4, the Wednesday before Oct. 7. On Friday October 6, we WhatsApped with all our other kids and with Yona,” Hazel recounted.
The Briefs are Shabbat observant but explained that since David’s father was potentially critically ill or unstable, Hazel suggested that David check his text messages right before going to the synagogue for Simchat Torah servives.
He saw a message from his sister updating that their dad was stable, and adding, “Sorry about what is going on in Israel.”
That got David’s attention, and then “He scrolled down and saw all the alerts,” Hazel said.
It was mid-afternoon Israel time, so the updates they had [received] were that Hamas had killed at least 100 Israelis and also taken many hostages.
They said they thought, “We must be misreading it. We called some of our other children, who reported that ‘Yona is fine, he’s in Sderot.’”
Then on Saturday night, the Duvdevan parents’ WhatsApp group lit up with the update that Yona’s immediate commander and friend Ben Bronshtein and his close friend Amir Fisher had been killed. That got them worried.
“No one had heard from Yona or could find him,” his mother said.
THEN THINGS got worse. “Yona was put on a list of deceased casualties of war,” Hazel said.
“Our daughter-in-law’s father works in the Defense Ministry regarding informing families of their deceased family members. Yona knew we were in Chicago. He told the Chicago Consulate to tell us that Yona was deceased.” He lived for another 417 days after that.
“Our kids in Jerusalem have a Duvdevan friend in synagogue, and he saw Yona’s name on the deceased list,” Hazel said. “He told our kids to go to the hospital so they could confirm the situation.”
But no one knew whether Yona was at Beilinson Medical Center or Sheba Medical Center. There were many anonymous soldiers there because the military units that had gone to the South were often mixed up and unrecorded.
Their kids rushed to Sheba because it was closer and reported that the situation there was complete chaos.
“Yona was taken in as an anonymous soldier. They couldn’t find his identity card, and although he was awake for four hours before they took him into surgery, no one asked him his name,” his mother said. In the chaos of the moment, they had hoped to use their fingerprint system to identify anonymous soldiers, but it wasn’t working.
Eventually they identified Yona, updated his parents, and the Briefs rushed back to Israel.
What followed was the 417-day battle of challenges but also hope and determination.
Oct. 7 probes
Even though they are generally positive people, the Briefs had questions.
“We met with the army officials and got the most updated version of the probe into the Kfar Aza battle,” David said. “If anything, we were left with more questions than when we went into the briefing. It was a colossal failure – it is hard to understand the magnitude of it at all levels.”
Yona and his unit told his parents that they “heard that terrorists were in a spot and just went to the first place where they saw them.”
“I feel sorry for the soldiers who had to go into this mess and clean it up. When they went in, they were the first ones there at 10:30 a.m., four hours after Hamas had penetrated the border,” David said.
“It’s just hard for me to believe that they had no intelligence about what was going on,” he continued. “They didn’t know who was there or anything. They were the first ones to go into that neighborhood, and they were not prepared.
“New videos have come out from 10:30 a.m. that day when they went in, and the border was wide open, with terrorists coming and going every which way,” David said.
“Why didn’t someone go to the border and start closing,” off the penetrations? he asked. “No one can give us an answer to that question.”
He criticized the army’s handling of the battle, saying that Yona’s unit “went in before they had a plan, and nobody took charge. Their command structure totally fell apart.”
Yona’s close friends Amir Fisher and Ben Bronshtein were ambushed and shot during the battle.
When Yona, sitting in a safer protected defensive position, saw and heard that they had fallen, he ran to try to rescue them and bring them to cover. As he was lifting his friends, Hamas fighters hit him with a few bullets.
Had he dropped his friends and tried to save his own skin at this point, he might have had far fewer wounds and might have survived long beyond the 417 days of struggle.
But Yona wouldn’t leave them. Having to move them slowed him down and allowed the terrorists to continue to shoot at him – 13 times in all.
This was at 11:15 a.m.
SOMEHOW, DESPITE being badly wounded, Yona put tourniquets on his legs and one of his arms and was eventually evacuated on a Hummer.
The vehicle tried to take him to a helicopter. “At the Saad Junction, they took him off the hood of the Hummer and put him behind a concrete block. Another car took him back to Kfar Aza, then on the road to Hoshaya, where he was transferred to an ambulance. He was then transported to another location to get on a [different] helicopter,” David said.
“We are not certain about the exact timing of his evacuation because his Duvdevan unit was out of the picture early on. They brought him someplace and then left him,” he said.
Various soldiers accused Maj. H, one of the officers in charge, of freezing up.
Only at 3 p.m. did Yona arrive at Sheba – a critical delay of four hours.
One of the essential questions that impacts whether Yona might have survived is why he was not evacuated on the first helicopter instead of the second one.
The narrative that Yona’s parents have heard from multiple Duvdevan soldiers who were on the ground with him suggests that Yona was more badly wounded than those who were evacuated on the first helicopter.
They have surmised that Duvdevan commanders Maj. H and Lt.-Col. D decided that Yona was not going to make it, so they deprioritized his evacuations in favor of soldiers who looked like their wounds were less severe.
The parents report that in meetings with D, when he talked about how hard he tried to look after Yona, the other soldiers in the room rolled their eyes.
Further, the parents have challenged whether the officer has been probed for his conduct regarding Yona and the unit by an outside officer with whom he has no connection.
To date, they said that the female soldier who is their contact for all issues related to Yona has shrugged her shoulders and has been unable to provide answers, saying only that there will be some kind of later report to them specifically on these issues, but with no time lines.
After all of that, the Briefs are still proud Zionists, devoted to the State of Israel, and have tremendous pride in who Yona was, sometimes speaking about him in the present tense.
On March 27, the Briefs held a blood drive in Yona’s memory. Public figures and many residents of Modi’in and elsewhere who were deeply impacted by Yona’s story will be sure to keep his memory alive.
