Bab al-Wad is the ravine road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where Mija Wald was killed on April 2, 1948, while escorting a convoy to Jerusalem. The battle makes the place a point of physical danger; the later, fragmented discovery of Mija’s fate turns it into a lasting locus of grief for his father, Gershom Wald, and his widow, Atalia Abravanel.

Setting and wartime significance

The route toward Jerusalem ran through a deep, winding ravine. Arab fighters fired on the convoys from the mountains on both sides of the road, making the narrow passage especially perilous as darkness approached. During the attack in which Mija was lost, a stone barrier blocked the road. Some fighters climbed down from the armored trucks to clear it, while others went up the hillside to attack the snipers’ positions with homemade grenades.

The battle and Mija’s death

Mija, then thirty-seven, had been sent to escort one of the convoys. The attack on the hillside was repulsed, and at nightfall the fighters withdrew, carrying away the dead and wounded—but not everyone. As the convoy neared Jerusalem, someone noticed that Mija was missing. A platoon searched the slopes the following morning, with Mija’s close friends, most of them ten or fifteen years younger than he was, looking through the area until they found him.

Discovery and aftermath

The circumstances of Mija’s final hours remain uncertain. He may have lain alone, wounded, through the night; he may have cried for help or tried to crawl toward the road. Another possibility is that Arab fighters found him after the convoy’s withdrawal. His body had been mutilated: he had been slaughtered, stripped from the waist down, and castrated. The account does not establish whether the mutilation occurred before or after his throat was cut, leaving that sequence permanently unresolved.

A place carried into memory

Gershom learned the details not from an official account or from the search party, but by chance, about a year after Mija’s death. A companion of Mija’s died in a work accident in Galilee, and Gershom received the man’s diary; in fewer than ten words, it recorded how Mija had been found among the rocks. The sparse written trace contrasts with the vivid, recurring image that Gershom says has occupied his mind ever since. Atalia, recounting the battle, likewise returns to the location and the unanswered details. Bab al-Wad therefore marks both a wartime loss and the painful gap between what can be documented and what surviving witnesses are left to imagine.