Mor Swid Gabay was a wedding planner, a security worker, and a songwriter. On October seventh, she was killed rushing home to her mother

Today as well Mor Swid Gabay is dead. Mor, who was 30, grew up alone with her mother, Malka – first on Moshav Shuva, and later in the city of Netivot. As a child, Malka recalls, “Mor was the funniest kid in kindergarten and in class, and everyone always wanted to be around her. Mor was a happy child and she felt that her purpose in the world was to make people happy and spread goodness”

From a shelter in Sderot, Mor managed to warn her friends to find cover and spoke with her mother. She asked her to take care of her dogs

As a child, Mor was very close to her grandfather Bechor, and “they were really like friends who did everything together”. When she came of age, she studied in a Bnei Akiva ulpana and chose literature as a major, she also wrote stories, poems and songs  from an early age. Some of her texts had already been turned into songs broadcast on Israeli radio stations.

Coming from a religious education, she turned first to a year of national service through a program called “Ve’Hadarta” – providing accompaniment and assistance to the elderly. But then she reversed course and enlisted in the military, serving three years at Chavat HaShomer – a base that trains last-chance recruits with adjustment difficulties – where her role was to attend to the social, familial, and economic needs of the soldiers under her command. Her fellow servicewoman Lior remembers her smile, “with endless concern for the soldiers, and always speaking to them at eye level”.

After her discharge, Mor worked at the Land Border Crossings Authority at the Ministry of Defense. She then studied event production and opened an independent company called Menu, and worked as a wedding planner: many couples from communities in the south were married under her direction. Later she moved to the community of Nitzana, on the Egyptian border, where she also worked in security. Two years before her death she returned to live with her mother in Netivot and was working at a club called Baraka and at a student bar in Beersheba called Mileva.

Mor also volunteered constantly. Every year, when the Negev fields filled with blooming red anemones, she would take time off from work and volunteer alongside her mother at the Darom Adom tourism festival. One hobby she cultivated was photography. Family members said she would photograph things most people pass without seeing: the sky, the moon, the trees and the bushes, “always from special angles that highlight the beauty in simplicity”. She would send the photographs to the people she loved, as a kind of greeting cards.

On October seventh, Mor was on her way home after spending the previous evening with friends at Zikim Beach. When the rocket fire began, she pulled over and ducked into a shelter at the entrance to Sderot. She managed to warn her friends still at Zikim beach to find cover, and spoke from there with her mother. She told her that “something bad is happening” and asked her to take care of her dogs – Zoe and Ted. When the sirens briefly paused, she got back into her car and rushed toward home in Netivot. But at the Sderot junction, she drove into an ambush. Hamas gunmen shot her dead.

After her death, her friend, the singer Naveh Guedj, gathered text messages Mor had sent her over the years and turned them into a song called “Belongs to Everyone”. It includes the line: “Just to look at you again, a million thoughts float up: what could you have still become?”.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)