I though this to be a small, sparsely covered yet important story worth some space. According to a report by IsraelNationalNews, a group of Yeshiva students at a high school in the town of M’aleh Hever (shown here) near Hebron were the first to take pictures and footage of the crash site of Asaf Ramon’s plane on Sunday. Only 1.2 kilometers away, they ran outside with cameras and filmed the plane bruning, the arrival of emergency crews, and the chaos of the incident.
Being the only ones to obtain footage of the incident so close to the actual impact, they were offered thousands of shekels by several news agencies for rights to broadcast it. They would have, yet when they found out that an IAF pilot had been killed, they consulted the head of their Yeshiva, Rabbi Amichai Chazan, who cautioned them to behave ethically.
They decided not to sell the footage out of respect for the family and the dead. “I don’t want to profit from this type of situation in which a soldier dies,” said Nehorai Hadad, one of the students involved.
They decided, instead of selling the pictures, to give the photos to the army personnel investigating the crash – and dedicated their evening’s Torah study in memory of Assaf ben Ilan and Rona Ramon.
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