The African Hebrew Israelites have called on the Israel Defense Forces to explain how exactly one of the community’s soldiers died on her base over the weekend and why the soldier’s family received conflicting accounts of what happened to her.
Military personnel visited the family of 19-year-old Toveet Radcliffe early Sunday morning and informed them that she had been found dead in her bed on Palmachim Airbase, according to a statement issued Tuesday by the Dimona community. Hours later, the personnel visited the family again and gave a different account, saying that she shot herself in the head while doing guard duty between 10:00 PM and 12:00 AM Saturday night and that her body was found by a soldier coming to relieve her.
The community raised a number of questions in its statement about the circumstances surrounding Radcliffe’s death, including why she was doing guard duty alone Saturday night, why her commander had not checked in on her, why no one heard a gunshot, and why, according to the IDF, there were no security cameras in the vicinity of her guard station.
“These are just a few of the basic questions that we are seeking answers to so that we can try to process this horrible tragedy,” the statement said. “We know that our pain is understood and felt by many families in Israel who have also lost loved ones while serving the country.”
Radcliffe is the first African Hebrew Israelite soldier to fall while in uniform. Community members, also known as Black Hebrews, have been drafted out of high school since their legal status was upgraded to permanent residency in 2003. (Permanent residency, like full citizenship, carries mandatory military service.) More than 200 have served to date, including in combat units, said community spokesperson Ahdeev Ben Yehuda.
“We always understood and accepted the possibility that we may have some fatalities, but we were only thinking of that in regard to wartime,” Ben Yehuda told Haaretz. “When you’re pulling regular guard duty and something like that happens, that’s a tragedy that we weren’t expecting.”
He said the grief that community members are experiencing has been exacerbated by the IDF’s lack of transparency. “There’s been no reliable information coming from the military since it happened,” he said.
An IDF spokesperson said that the case is currently being investigated by military police and that there is no new information to share.
Over the past three days, Radcliffe’s friends have posted tributes on social media, including a black and white image of her next to the words “We Want Justice.” Some described Radcliffe’s death as suspicious and used the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter,” which is associated with recent protests in the United States over the killings of unarmed black people.
(Coincidentally, Radcliffe died as the IDF began an online public relations campaign called “IDF Diversity Week.” The army has been spotlighting soldiers from minority communities on its Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. “All of us are unique, together we are one strong IDF family,” the IDF tweeted on Monday.)
Several of Radcliffe’s classmates from the African Hebrew Israelite community’s Achva School in Dimona described her as a quiet young woman who loved animals. They said she was helping her mother raise her three younger siblings after her father left the family for the U.S.
“We made plans to see each other on the base [on Sunday],” said a friend and fellow soldier who requested anonymity because she had not received approval from her commander to speak to the press. “I was actually on the bus on my way to the base when someone called me with the news. I was thinking she was just injured. It still hasn’t sunk in.”
The friend said that Radcliffe seemed depressed when she first arrived at Palmachim Airbase about a month ago but that she acted normally on weekends in Dimona. According to the friend, Radcliffe told her mother last week that she did not want to spend another Shabbat on the base. “There was something going on in her unit that was bothering her,” the friend said.
The suicide rate for IDF soldiers has dropped in recent years, from 28 in 2010 to 15 last year. In 2013, a record low seven soldiers killed themselves.
It has been a difficult season for the African Hebrew Israelites, who identify themselves as the direct descendants of the Biblical Israelites. Their spiritual leader, Ben Ammi Ben Israel, died from an undisclosed illness on December 27.
