This past year was supposed to be David Revayev’s last as an active duty soldier in the Israeli military. He spent the fall thinking about his plans for the future—traveling to Japan, saving money, deciding what he wanted to study. These plans changed in mid-December when he woke up in the hospital missing a leg, three weeks after being injured in northern Gaza.
Revayev was injured while serving as a military photographer. After October 7, he was assigned to document the site of the Nova festival, where 364 people were killed. “This was just a few days later, after they received the approval that the area had been cleared of terrorists,” he said. “We entered and saw all the horrors. Everything. The uniforms stained with blood, everything burnt, abandoned and overturned vehicles, exploded, pieces of things, blood splatters. I remember everything, and I still feel like I haven’t processed it all yet.”
In late November, Revayev was assigned to enter Gaza with Brigade 614 of the Combat Engineering Corps. Being a photographer in a combat unit meant being a combat soldier first and foremost. “Usually, we’re also assigned to the brigade commander, up front,” he said.
After a month in Gaza, Revayev went home for a four-day break. Two weeks into his next stint in Gaza he experienced the injury that would change his life.
On December 12, Brigade 614’s unit was attacked by Hamas members, who fired an RPG at them. The missile killed Staff Sgt. Oriya Yaakov and injured Riveiv and three other soldiers.
The entire event was captured on Revayev’s GoPro camera, and he’s found himself returning to that footage in his months of recovery.
“I said: ‘I’ll film this, so I’ll have it.' I didn’t expect this event to occur,” he said. “After the injury, I kept going back to the footage again and again. It was necessary for an investigation, but mainly, I wanted the certainty. I didn’t want to think it didn’t happen to me. It was important for me to revisit it, to remember what happened to me. It’s not an event you go through every day. By simply accepting that you went through it, that’s already a form of therapy.”
Revayev was fully conscious during his evacuation to the hospital, even though his condition was critical. “I mainly remember that I couldn’t feel my legs and couldn’t move,” he said. In the hospital, he was sedated and ventilated for three weeks. When he woke up, his right leg had been amputated, likely due to an infection that occurred during the injury.
“When you wake up, with all the drugs and painkillers, you’re not exactly aware of what’s going on around you. They just come and say: We amputated your leg. And you’re like: Oh, okay. That was my reaction. It didn’t sink in that I lost a leg, and now I have to learn to walk again,” Revayev said.
His family was by his side through the entire recovery. They fought to keep his spirits up and sometimes had a bit of fun at his expense.
“The first thing my mom said to me when I woke up was that I had slept for two years,” he said. “She and my friends and siblings did a little prank on me. That’s the kind of people they are. She quickly gave in and said I had only slept for three weeks.”
After waking up, he spent most of the time lying in bed. “At first, it was hard for me to eat,” he said. “My stomach didn’t remember how to function, and I didn’t really have an appetite. My parents had to be by my side 24/7, taking care of me, feeding me, and the medical staff as well.”
Revayev’s siblings refused to pity him. “They would say, ‘Come on, let’s play ping pong,’ ‘Come on, let’s take a walk,’ just silly stuff, brotherly play, things like that,” he said.
One of his first solid memories from after the injury is a visit from stand-up comedian Yonatan Barak that his family arranged. “The first thing he asked me was why I had Rubik's cubes on the table. That’s a hobby of mine, but I didn’t even know they were on the table,” Revayev said. “He said, 'Come on, let’s solve one.' I solved it, and he didn’t.”
While recovering in the hospital, Revayev fell in love with his childhood friend Bar. “After I was injured, she came to visit, and then it began,” he said. “There’s no doubt that this made everything much easier, and it’s something I’m very grateful for. I don’t know if it would have happened if I hadn’t been injured.”
After about four months of hospitalization, he began to spend weekends at his family home in Lod. But it soon became clear that the house was not accessible. The family moved to an accessible house in Rishon LeZion, which Revayev is happy about. “It’s a fresh start in a bigger city,” he said. “I have friends here, there are more things to do, and later I might find a job here.”
There’s a lot to do to get used to his new body. “I have physiotherapy twice a week at Tel Hashomer, I need to practice, keep in good shape, strengthen the muscles around the amputation,” he said.
For now, Revayev can walk with a prosthetic and a cane. He hopes to one day be able to walk without the cane. “It may sound funny, but physically, I miss my leg, feeling it. Jumping, running, kicking a stone out of boredom,” he said.
He also experiences phantom pains in his missing leg, as well as moments of forgetting that his leg is missing. “If I’m holding something and it’s about to fall, I try to stop it with my leg or kick something,” he said. “Those small things. They play a bigger role in life than one thinks.”
At the same time, he’s well aware of how lucky he is to be alive. “A person next to me died. Others were injured much more severely than I was,” he said. “There were some who were hospitalized with me whose condition was very serious, or who died in the hospital. I understood how my condition is nothing compared to what I saw, that I don’t even have the right to complain. Not that I don’t have the right, but even if I complain, it won’t help. It won’t bring my leg back.”
Revayev is grateful for his family, friends, and girlfriend and grateful for modern medical technology. His injury has also allowed him to realize he’s stronger than he thought. “To go through something like this and say, I’m here, and I won’t give up, and I’m fighting, and I’m moving on. That’s not something to take for granted,” he said. “And that’s mine. It’s important to see the horizon and to take small steps. It wasn’t simple, and it won’t be simple, but I’m here.”
