Missing Israeli soldier’s family desperately tries to find her after phone goes offline
The last time Roni Eshel’s family heard from her was a brief Saturday morning text that the Israeli teen sent to her mother, Sharon.
“Hi mother — I’m okay. I’m busy. I love you,” wrote Eshel, a 19-year-old soldier in the Israel Defense Forces who was stationed at a military base in Nahal Oz, near Gaza.
That was around 9:30 a.m. — about three hours after Hamas gunmen stormed across the heavily fortified Israeli border under a blazing hail of rockets, butchering civilians and kidnapping hostages as they went.
It wasn’t unusual that Eshel’s unit would be busy — they’re always busy, her uncle, Elad Levy, told The Post from his suburban home outside Tel Aviv.
But the family also knew this wasn’t like any other day.
They quickly lost touch with the soldier, who was in her second year of mandatory military service.
They haven’t heard from her since.
“You know, think about the mother and father,” Levy, 49, said of his sister-in-law, Sharon, and her husband, Eyal. “They know their baby girl is in harm’s way. They don’t know where she is.”
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“How is she? Is she in pain? Is she hurt? Was she kidnapped by Hamas?” he asked. “Is she maybe hurt, and needs help and still can be saved? These are the types of things we talk about.”
“We’ve tried to call her phone, and we tried to locate her phone — we couldn’t,” Levy, a father of three who lived on the Upper East Side for more than a decade, told The Post.
“It just went offline around 9:30 a.m.”
The IDF told the family Wednesday morning they’ve officially listed Eshel as missing, which means they can’t find her but she doesn’t appear to be dead or wounded.
It was still difficult news to digest.
But Levy said the family — which includes Roni’s two teenage siblings — has forged ahead in a desperate attempt to track down the missing girl.
“They haven’t slept for four days,” said Levy, a former investment banker and Columbia University graduate who moved back to Israel in 2011 to be near family.
“They barely eat … You know, they’re devastated,” he continued. “But at the same time, they are resilient and determined to find Roni and get her released.”
Family members are working every contact they have, visiting every hospital and watching every gruesome video Hamas releases, searching in vain for any sign of Eshel.
“We’re just focusing on what we can do,” Levy said. “Whatever we have control of, chasing any piece of information. And we’re leaving no stone unturned.”
When Hamas launched the savage attack — which ignited a war that’s already killed more than a thousand people on each side and wounded many thousands more — Eshel was posted in the base’s heavily fortified command center, Levy said.
When the Hamas attackers figured out they could not breach the building with guns or grenades, they employed fire to do their devilish work.
“They started to burn the command post with the people inside,” Levy said.
Within minutes, thick, black smoke flooded the room, blinding the dozen or so soldiers inside and choking them with acrid fumes.
One soldier broke out a window, and several escaped. Others didn’t, and died in the assault.
And some, like Eshel, simply disappeared.
“They didn’t find them, they’re not in hospitals, they didn’t find them around the base,” Levy said. “They didn’t find their bodies … That’s what we know.”
But the family refuses to believe the worst. And her parents are showing a strength that Levy said he’s never seen before.
Israel-Hamas war: How we got here
2005: Israel unilaterally withdraws from the Gaza Strip more than three decades after winning the territory from Egypt in the Six-Day War.
2006: Terrorist group Hamas wins a Palestinian legislative election.
2007: Hamas seizes control of Gaza in a civil war.
2008: Israel launches military offensive against Gaza after Palestinian terrorists fired rockets into the town of Sderot.
2023: Hamas launches the biggest attack on Israel in 50 years, in an early-morning ambush Oct. 7, firing thousands of rockets and sending dozens of militants into Israeli towns.
Terrorists killed more than 1,200 Israelis, wounded more than 4,200, and took at least 200 hostage.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to announce, “We are at war,” and vowed Hamas would pay “a price it has never known.”
The Gaza Health Ministry — which is controlled by Hamas — reported at least 3,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 12,500 injured since the war began.
“They’re like lions,” he marveled.
They want their daughter’s story out there, he said, because the public needs to know the bloody toll the attack has taken on his native land.
“What happened on Saturday was a genocide,” Levy said. “This is how we see it. These are crimes against humanity.”
“We have one Roni,” he said. “But there are 2,000 other Ronis in Israel. We demand all the Western countries in the world demand the immediate release of all the hostages — unconditionally.”
“We need the world to understand that they have to support us, unequivocally,” he continued. “We need to demolish Hamas the same as we demolished ISIS.”
“Nobody negotiated with ISIS, nobody spoke to them,” he said. “We just killed them all. We’re going to do the same thing with Hamas.”
