Shlomo Miller's Story

The story of Shlomo Miller (HY"D) the Security Coordinator of Itamar as told by the senior instructor of Magen Yehuda.


On August 13, 2004 Shlomo Miller, the Coordinator of the Security in Itamar, was murdered by a terrorist from a neighboring Arab village, Beit Forik. About thirty suicide terrorists are among the sons of this village who again and again tried to harm the neighboring Jewish village, Itamar.

These are the events as told by Amichai Cohen the commander of the local TRT called Gidonim. Amichi arrived at the scene and was able to kill the terrorist.

At approximately ten o'clock in the morning on that faithful Friday Amichi, his brother and two friends were sitting at home.
Suddenly they heard shots that sounded close to their house but not too close. At this level it could mean life threatening danger for the village or its inhabitants. (At least that is how it sounded at that minute). Gun shooting is heard in the Itamar area quite often and the TRT team of the village debated whether to go investigate or not.

However Amichi had an instinctive feeling about those shots and without further to-do they immediately left the house to investigate. Listening to the shots they were able to discover that they were coming from their south. They got into their private cares and raced in the direction of the shots.
As they drove they tried to gather more information on what was going on. At one point they decided to get out of the car and advance by foot. The spread out as they had been taught, as if they were going towards live fire.
Amichi was in command and instructed them to go forward from place of cover to the next place of cover, as residents of Itamar they new the area very well. As they went forward they met a car going past them. The driver, a resident of Itamar was panicky as he told them his car had been shot at..

They interrogated him some more which helped them understand where the shooting was coming from. They looked out over the area they suspected and discovered the fighting. Even though it was a clear morning it was difficult to figure out who was shooting at whom. They were able to identify the security car driven by Shlomo Miller who was in charge of the security in Itamar.
They thought they saw him turn around and therefore decided that it was Shlomo who was shooting the terrorist. They shouted towards the man shooting that they were from the security team of Itamar but the person shooting turned towards them and started shooting at them. However when they had practice sessions to prepare them for a day like that day, they learned to shout out who they were but also to stay under cover. Thus they were saved.

The person shooting was the terrorist, not Shlomo Miller. Amichi and his teammates were able to return fire from their place of cover until they saw him fall behind Shlomo Miller's car. They advanced in form as taught, going from one place of cover to the next, protecting each other as they got closer.

At the distance of fifteen meters from the terrorist they fired a few more shots to make sure he was dead. They reported the incident to the army which still hadn’t arrived at

the scene of the battle. Amichi and his team continued to check out the area to make sure there were not any more terrorists and to take care of Shlomo Miller who had been injured.

Slowly forces began to arrive and Sholmo was taken by helicopter to hospital. The commander of the area also arrived. If it hadn’t been for the very professional fighting of Amichi and his team mates the terrorist would have entered the populated area of Itamar where he planned to kill as many people as possible. The TRT of Itamar was able to help avoid a terrible tragedy, planned by the terrorist.

Amichi called me from the battlefield quite agitated but he wanted to immediately thank me for the training sessions we had given the TRT of Itamar . He said that they were able to shoot the terrorist without suffering major losses because of the instructions they had been given and without the practice we insisted on they would have panicked like the driver of the car who was shot at.

I have no doubt that Sholmo would have been proud of his TRT team fighting together so bravely.

Shlomo Miller Thank you letter to Magen Yehuda