Blue and White MK and former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi met with Golani veterans via Zoom on Tuesday and spoke about friends who died during the battle of Beaufort Castle during the 1982 Lebanon War as part of Israel's Remembrance Day.
Ashkenazi, who was an IDF commander during the war, spoke about the six men who died taking the castle from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): Guni Hernik, Yaron Zamir, Yosef Eli-Al, Gil Ben Akiva, Avikam Saraf and Raz Goterman.
Ashkenazi spoke about Guni, who “couldn’t be away from his men,” and took command of the operation on the ground and “paid with his life."“He came, joined, fought and died,” Ashkenazi said, adding that this is the kind of personal bravery and example he thinks should be at the center of Remembrance Day.
He asked those who attended the virtual meeting to spend the day telling the story of one person they know who died while in service to honor their lives.
After the battle, then-defense minister Ariel Sharon told reporters that Israeli forces incurred no casualties, which led to a fierce protest by Guni’s mother, the poet Reayah Hernik.Hernik became a fierce anti-war activist, and her work eventually led to the Four Mothers Movement and the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.
The war, and the IDF's decades-long stay in Lebanon, is the subject of various Israeli films including the 2007 film Beaufort and the 2018 animated film Waltz with Bashir.
Fifteen PLO men died during the battle; the Palestinians used the position to shell towns in northern Israel.
Due to the Beaufort Castle being a Crusader-era castle, the PLO regarded it in the context of Islamic forces eventually winning over their foes.