Ronen Hanania, 49, spent his life by his son Daniel’s side and was shot to death as he sat next to him during a terrorist attack in Hebron just a few days short of his 50th birthday.
“I love you very much,” Daniel said Sunday evening as he stood near his father’s body, which was draped in a white and black prayer shawl, stretched out on an olive gurney and laid out on a stone slab at Jerusalem’s Har Hamenuhot Cemetery.
"Father I love you very much."
Daniel
“You were with me the whole way, all the time, even in the last moments of your life,” said Daniel, who wore black sunglasses and a torn black T-shirt.
His hand and lower arms were in a cast from the bullet wound he sustained when a Palestinian terrorist shot at their parked car as they sat inside after visiting a Palestinian convenience store located near the gate of the West Bank Kiryat Arba settlement where they live.
Ronen was hit in the head and died almost immediately. Daniel, who was lightly wounded, called for help and ran back inside the store.
Even as he spoke of his deep sorrow at his father’s passing, he thanked God for the “miracle” that saved his own life.
“My dear father, I don’t believe that I am in this situation,” he said. “God made a miracle and left me alive.”
His father had been given the honor of “dying in the sanctification of God’s name,” something that few are worthy of, Daniel said.
Mother and sister mourn
His mother, Merav, was also torn between gratitude that her son was spared and sorrow at losing her husband.
“I have nothing in this world but my husband and my son,” she said in a tearful voice. Her hair was hidden under a brown and beige scarf, and her glasses were on top of her head.
“Thank God 100 times that my son was saved,” Merav said.
Of her husband’s death, she said, “I am not angry at God, but it’s hard to accept... still, my husband will always be with me.”
Her husband, she said, “was such a good man who helped everyone. He was a wonderful man. Every place he went, people loved him. He was good to me and my son.”
Ronen’s sister briefly disrupted the ceremony, when she entered in a wheelchair yelling her brother’s name repeatedly and wailing.
Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir eulogize Ronen
Religious Zionist Party head Bezalel Smotrich and his party colleague Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the Otzma Yehudit faction, took time from the campaign trail two days before the election to eulogize Ronen.
Ben-Gvir lives near the site of the attack in Hebron. He used the platform to call on the government to stop sacrificing Israeli lives while coddling terrorists.
“We will do everything so that our soldiers will not be restrained,” he said. “We will do everything to ensure that Ronen is the last victim.”