Netanyahu Meets IDF Orphans Ahead of Memorial Day: "Your Fathers' Courage Secures Israel's Future"

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met today (Sunday) with widows and orphans from the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization, ahead of Israel's Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror.

To those present, Netanyahu said: "How do you live with the pain? It is very hard, and I can tell you that we all feel it. I lost my older brother, and it was as if someone took an axe and cut off my arm and cut off my leg. Then someone came to me during the shiva, and he told me that he too had lost a brother; he was a bereaved brother. He said to me: 'I know you won't believe me, but the suffering you feel now will not be at this same intensity and with these torments you feel now, and there is life after this'."

"There are also new horizons, and you will have new lives and there will be new joys. There will be joys. I know it's hard to believe right now, but there will be. But the greatest thing I can tell you is this: it was not in vain. It was not in vain, because without them we have no existence. And we are here, and it is thanks to the heroes, our chain of heroes."

"Therefore, your parents are heroes, and you—with the pain and the memory and the absence—have one thing you know: your fathers are the ones who guarantee the eternity of Israel."