local
moved to Kfar Saba together, arrived
early at the bar, planning to meet
friends. “They arranged to meet some
friends. They were childhood friends,
always cared for each other. When they
did not answer — we understood that
something had happened. We under-
stood that the worst had happened. The
two friends who went out together were
murdered,” friend Gal Benvenisti said
to The Times of Israel.

Omri Morad, along with his wife and
children, joined his family in Israel on
April 9 for his brother’s funeral. They
plan to stay there for the near future.

“He loved traveling abroad but
mainly in Israel. There was almost
no weekend when he and his friends
didn’t take another hiking trip, some
other canal or reef,” Omri Morad said.

“[There are] so many pictures under
waterfalls that he has with his friends.

He was amazing socially ... He had so
many social groups.”
Tomer Morad was a fourth-year under-
graduate student at Tel Aviv University,
where he matriculated after his time as
an officer in the Israel Defense Forces.

After learning of his death, staff from his
elementary and high school reached out
to the Morad family.

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“We were just thinking about phrases
to describe him for the grave design,
and we decided that the bottom line
will be, ‘You will always be remem-
bered alive’ because he was only 27 —
It’s something that is unbearable for us
— But in those 27 years, he managed to
do so much,” Omri Morad said.

Omri Morad and his mother visited
the site of Tomer Morad’s death 48
hours afterward, per his mother’s insis-
tence and despite his warning that the
bar, which was closed on that Saturday
night, would be a hotbed for protesters,
both Israeli and Palestinian.

“When we were there, it was like a
zoo,” Morad said. “There were both
groups — political groups from both
sides of the road — both of them
shouting, cursing, throwing things at
each other.”
The scene “completely overwhelmed”
Morad’s mother.

“It’s ridiculous. In Israel, people say
that in every family, there is some
relation to a casualty of war, casualty
of terrorist attack,” Omri Morad said.

“We hadn’t had that. Yes, we had things
happen to us in our life. But none were
so tragic and so horrible as the murder
of my brother Tomer.”
The disaster illustrated one of the
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