Major Chaggai Ben-Ari HY”D, 31, has become the 73rd fatality of Operation Protective Edge, the IDF counter-terrorism offensive in Gaza in the summer of 2014. Ben-Ari, who was severely wounded, has been unconscious since then and he was niftar on Tuesday, 5 Teves 5777. He became the 68th soldier killed in the operation, which claimed the lives of five citizens and a foreign worker as well.

Ben-Ari served in the elite Maglan reconnaissance unit in the Paratroops Brigage, and was on a brief vacation with his wife and their children when the military operation began. He was brought back to service in the elite unit and seriously wounded during the fighting when a sniper’s bullet pierced his helmet in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza on the fourth day of the fighting.

The family is from Moshav Nov in the Golan Heights and those family members who are not career officers are farmers. The niftar was a son to Yoni Ben-Ari, who is the former director of the torani garin in Tzfat and director of the city’s hesder yeshiva.

The levaya was held on Wednesday, 6 Teves at 2:00PM in the Chispin Cemetery in the Golan Heights. He is survived by his wife and three children, 8,5, and 2.

The following video was made when his family celebrated his 30th birthday, in 2015.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem/Photo Credit: Victim’s Facebook page)