‘I feel like a mother to the soldiers who killed my son’

In Hampstead, north-west London, on a Friday afternoon, a time usually reserved for Shabbat preparations, Iris holds an audience of 90 women rapt for nearly two hours as she shares what happened on those fateful days, who the person behind the floppy ginger hair really was and her extraordinary response to his death.

“Yotam was very talented in a lot of ways. He was clever, he was funny, he was a musician, but he suffered from depression and from anxiety, even when he was very young,” she says.

Yotam Haim[Missing Credit]

Iris, who also spoke at an Emunah event this week, puts his mental health struggles partly down to severe stomach problems, which began as a baby, when Yotam would cry in immense pain and feeding him became impossible. He endured stays in hospital and unpleasant and invasive treatment. “They said that in the first year, because the child doesn’t remember, he will not be affected… but I knew afterwards that Yotam was very much affected from this first year.”

Yotam’s mental health meant that he found school difficult, suffered anorexia, was unable to do military service due to his eating disorder, and, at times, had suicidal thoughts. When he was a teenager, he began getting tattoos and at the time of his death, had 32 in all. These included one of a semi-colon, a symbol of hope and the strength to continue despite his mental health struggles.

“A semi-colon is a dot and a comma. Yotam had so many thoughts of, ‘Maybe it's time to separate from this world.’ But an alternative is the comma, to continue. And I think Yotam was having to make this choice every minute.”

Aside from his talents as a drummer, which led to him becoming part of heavy metal band Persephore, Yotam followed his father into agriculture. He moved out of the family home and rented an apartment on Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

“For us, it was very good place for Yotam because it was close to our house. We didn't want him to go far away because of all his problems.

“It didn’t matter that it was 700 metres from Gaza. For us, it was not an issue. The outside of a tunnel was in front of his house, but it was blocked. So, I said: ‘Okay, it doesn't matter.’”

Despite continuing mental health difficulties, life was seemingly getting better for Yotam. He had a job he enjoyed, his own home and his band was winning fans and due to open a festival in Tel Aviv on the evening of October 7.

The title of Iris Haim's talk [Missing Credit]

But that morning at 6.29am, the tranquility of the Gaza Envelope, which pre-October 7, was, says Iris, like “heaven”, was shattered by an unprecedented attack, when thousands of Hamas terrorists broke through the border fence, slaughtered around 1,200 people and took 251 hostage.

The family started getting WhatsApp messages from Yotam at 6.40am. At first, with the terrorists not yet in Kfar Aza, he was less concerned about an attack than he was about missing the concert, says Iris. “He said: ‘Why today? Why today?’... He sent messages to his friends in the band, saying to them: ‘Don't worry. In a few hours, it will finish, and I will come to Tel Aviv. We will do the show.’”

Shortly afterwards, he messaged his family to say that terrorists were in the kibbutz. “We didn’t understand what he meant. Maybe one terrorist, two terrorists. This is the maximum we could imagine. We told him that everything will be okay soon and that the army will come.”

Yotam continued to post on social media for a few more hours, “using humour, music, a lot of jokes…You can see [from his posts,] he was not afraid.”

But, at around 10 o’clock, the tone of the messages abruptly changed. “He started to say: ‘They are here, Ima [Mum]. It's a matter of minutes. I don't know if I will survive. I want to…I wish I will survive, but if not, know that I love you all.’”

Despite only being seven minutes away, “we cannot do anything”, recounts Iris. “We are all in our shelters, trying to reach the army, the police, but there is no one to talk to… We just sent him messages: ‘Don't worry, the army is there.’ But we don't know. We don't know anything.”

The last message Yotam sent was at 10.44, to his sister, who asked him if the terrorists were still there. He replied: “I don't know. I can’t go out. Everything is burning, and I'm afraid to go out.”

For the next two days, Iris held on to the hope that her son was alive in Kfar Aza but that his phone battery had run out. But when the army informed her that he wasn’t on the kibbutz anymore, she clung to the possibility that he had been taken hostage. “A little, little, little window was opened there and said: ‘Don't lose hope…Maybe he's alive.’”

Credit: 1000 Words Photography by TaliaG[Missing Credit]

It took three weeks for the army to confirm that Yotam was being held captive, during which time, she decided not to try to find out for herself through either conventional or social media, thinking: “There is one truth, dead or alive. Sooner or later, I will know, but I will not go crazy from all the people sitting on the television and talking, talking, talking.”

Unlike other relatives of the missing, she didn’t become involved with big hostage campaigns. A palliative care nurse, trained in psychodrama, NLP and positive thinking, Iris says: “I wanted to stay very clear with my energy, pure energy for Yotam and to keep my mind in the mindset that he is alive, and not just alive, but well, not beaten and not hungry.

“If it's really true that they eat half a pita a day, Yotam used to eat less than a half pitta a day when he [had anorexia,] so he knows how to control his digestive system…I believed in all my heart that he was drumming because he was a musician and musicians always have music inside them... The drum is very primitive. You can just drum on your body.” (Iris later found out that Yotam’s captors had given him some drumsticks.)

But her positivity grated on some people. “I believed that he was getting medicines, and people said: ‘You believe that your son is having medicine from Hamas, then, for sure, you’ve gone crazy. Why do you believe this?’ I told them: ‘I don't know anything, so if I don’t know anything, I can choose what to put here,’” says Iris, pointing to her head.

By her own admission, before October 7, Iris “didn't like” Orthodox people – “I thought all of them wanted to take me back to the religion” –  but her optimism resonated with many of them. “I just spoke for myself and for Yotam. I said [to him]: ‘If you hear me, I want you to know that we believe that you are coming back. You are strong. Everybody's waiting for you.’”

It was after one of Iris’ talks in the Golan Heights that a religious woman in the audience contacted her to say that she “loved” her voice because it was “very different from all the other voices, the depression, the hate, the anger. She said to me: ‘You must continue talking because you give me strength.’”

The lady was a jeweller and offered to make Iris the necklace with the words: “Believe to see that there is good”, and it was at this point that Iris decided to remove the dog-tag that said: “My heart is captured in Gaza” “because my heart is not captured. I will decide where is my heart is. They will not take my heart.”

The necklace Iris Haim wears (Credit: 1000 Words Photography by Talia G)[Missing Credit]

At one talk, she found herself sharing the stage with a religious woman, Dina Guedalia, whose son Yosef Malachi, 22, was killed on October 7, trying to defend Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

“During her talk, I felt that I want to hug her…Maybe her son had tried to save Yotam. I felt immediately, I don't care about this anymore - the religious, the non-religious, the left and the right. We are just mothers. Mothers in pain, a lot of pain.”

While Iris was on a visit to London in November 2023 to meet the UK Jewish community, she heard from the army that security cameras on Kibbutz Kfar Aza had caught the moment that Yotam had been put into a car by the terrorists. “I saw Yotam walking on his feet, very, very powerfully, raising his ginger head…I felt his bravery, just that he will be okay, that my son would have the chance to stay alive.”

Her hopes were further raised when one of the Thai hostages who was released in November 2023 told her about Yotam’s living conditions. “Everything that I had believed turned out to be right. He got medicines, got food, he drummed….They gave him drumsticks. He laughed. It was okay, not so terrible –  not like now.”

As Chanukah – the festival of miracles – began, they hoped and prayed for one to bring their son home. But on the eighth day, December 15, officials knocked on her door. “[One of the police officers] said Yotam was killed by IDF when he was escaping Hamas activity, and, by mistake, identified as a terrorist.”

Iris Haim speaking in London (Credit: 1000 Words Photography by TaliaG)[Missing Credit]

“I said: ‘It's impossible, I can't believe this. It cannot be,’ and for more than around 36 hours, I was just there, asking: “Why? Why?” and crying and screaming.”

It was a conversation with her former psychodrama teacher shortly after this devastating news that shifted Iris’ perspective.

The teacher put four chairs in the room and told Iris to sit on one of them and imagine she was Yotam. 

“I sat on this chair and said: ‘Ima, Mommy, Daddy, I want you to know that I escaped from Hamas because I could. I could do it, but I knew that maybe I will not stay alive because it's a very dangerous place. It's a war zone. But if I will not survive, just know that I died as a free person. I left this world as a free person, and I didn't let them kill me.”

This scenario made Iris take “a very huge turn, and I started to leave behind the ‘Whys?’, the ‘What ifs?’ and the ‘How can it be?’ I just saw Yotam like a partisan because the partisans also did something with a lot of courage. And, when a person does something for himself, he is already in a different position. He is not a victim.”

Thousands of people came to the shiva house, and Iris heard that the soldiers who had been responsible for Yotam’s death were “broken… They could not understand how this happened, telling  themselves: ‘We came to save, but in the end, we killed.’”

In an exceptional act of compassion, Iris recorded a moving video message for the soldiers, saying she loved them and wasn’t angry with them. “I became, not just Yotam’s mother, but also their mother.”

She sees Yotam’s story as not one of tragedy, but one of triumph. “A lot of people think that if Yotam was killed in the end, he failed, but not for us. He won this battle because he proved to himself, to us, to everybody, that even in darkness, the darkest places, you can still be a hero.”

For the past 18 months, Iris has amassed tens of thousands of followers on social media and travelled the world, sharing Yotam’s story and her message that while we “cannot change the end of the story, [we] can change our point of view of it. I have a lot of pain in my heart, a lot, but also, I have a lot of love and light, and I can choose. It is my power to choose.”

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, you can contact Jami on 020 8458 2223. If you need immediate help, you can phone the Samaritans free 24/7 on: 116 123

Yotam’s brother, Tuval Haim, has released an album, Achim (Brothers), dedicated to the memory of Yotam. @tuval_haim

For more information on Yotam Haim’s story and how he is being commemorated, go to:

yotam-haim.co.il/en/home-yotam-haim/