Eyal, father of Roni Eshel, an IDF lookout who fell at the Nahal Oz outpost on October 7, is still asking himself what really happened there.
In an interview Wednesday with Kalman Liebskind and Asaf Lieberman on Kan Reshet Bet, Eyal talked about the struggle of dealing with the vast amount of question marks surrounding the circumstances of her murder: "An investigation has not yet been carried out, there are only 'main findings.' Last week they found Roni's personal documents inside a house in Gaza. This is an unending upheaval, maybe she's actually alive? I don't know what we buried; they didn't let me open the coffin."
Eyal said that he asked to meet with the person who collected the disk they found in one of Roni's shoes, and to this day they have not been able to reach him. "One afternoon last week, we got a call from the security forces. Hours later they showed up at our house and handed us her driver's license and ID card with the appendix in a plastic case, like the one from the Population Authority," he said.
"I asked to send the documents to a lab. I told them that they might find fingerprints there, which could help the investigation, and they did nothing about it. They put it in the pocket of one of the soldiers and brought it to us in a most distant and cold way. This doesn't make sense. The whole process here is amateurish.
"I don't understand how they found the wallet with all the cards, including the credit card, and no one has touched them. There were no charges on the credit card. We check it up with the Bank of Israel. Nobody is telling me what's going on here."
"Maybe she’s even actually living somewhere in Gaza?" Eyal expressed his doubt. "In the end, all three of us are fathers. Somewhere we have some gut feeling about things like this. I have all sorts of thoughts, because on the one hand the Chief Rabbi said that from a halakhic point of view we can sit shiva and we had a funeral – but they wouldn’t let me open the coffin and say goodbye to her, so I don't know what exactly we buried."