The mother of a soldier killed in Gaza last week said Sunday she was on the phone with him when he was shot and killed, leaving her listening helplessly from far away as he called for help before succumbing to his wounds.

Sgt. Eyal Shynes, 19, was killed Thursday while serving in the southern Gaza Strip, apparently hit by a sniper as he spoke to his mother on the phone. He was buried Friday near his hometown kibbutz of Afik in the southern Golan Heights.

Meirav Shynes told Army Radio that she had been having a “great conversation with him” when the shooting started.

“We spoke for a few minutes. He said he would be coming home and would be there July 8, and that he had asked his commander if he could extend it until Saturday to attend a concert,” she said, speaking through tears. “And then suddenly I hear that they are shooting him, and that’s how the conversation ended. But we still heard everything and it was terrible.”

Shynes said she immediately understood that her son, who was posthumously elevated from corporal in line with standard Israel Defense Forces procedure, had been hit and wounded, but did not think he had been killed.

“I didn’t really hear shooting, I heard him yell and call for his sergeant,” she said. “And when I heard him call for his sergeant I was sure he was just injured.”

She said she immediately phoned her son’s social services liaison officer to inform her about what was going on, hoping to get word on where he was being transported for treatment.

“I was sure we would soon go looking for him in some hospital. I didn’t think I would be going to get [the bad] news,” she said.

She noted that she began to understand the severity of his condition once she and her husband began driving toward the Tel Aviv area, reasoning they would need to go south eventually and not wanting to wait until they got word about which hospital he was in. But after not getting any messages or calls from the army or responses to her own attempts to get information, they began to suspect the worst.

“And then they asked if we were at home and I then I really understood,” she said.

Shynes was serving with the Nahal Infantry Brigade’s 931st Battalion, which has been operating in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where the IDF says it is tackling the last major bastion of the Hamas terror group ruling Gaza.

The deadly attack was claimed Thursday afternoon by Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades armed wing, which later released grainy footage purporting to show a sniper hitting Shynes.

In the video, a soldier can be seen standing outside a building speaking on the phone while pacing when a shot appears to hit him in the back of his head and he disappears from view. Others can then be seen rushing to his aid. According to Hamas, the attack took place in the east of Rafah.

In the video, Shynes does not appear to be wearing a helmet, despite standing in the relative open.

A day before being killed, Shynes was interviewed by a journalist for Mishpacha magazine, apparently while in the same building he was standing next to when he was killed, according to Army Radio. The presence of a journalist, generally brought by the IDF for short forays into Gaza under heavily controlled conditions, may indicate that the military believed the area to be relatively safe, and may offer clues to the soldier’s apparent laxity while on the phone.

The death brought the toll of slain troops in the ground offensive against Hamas and operations along the Gaza border to 316. On Saturday, that tally ticked higher as the army announced that two more soldiers — Staff Sgt. Yair Avitan, 20, and Sgt. First Class (res.) Yakir Shmuel Tatelbaum, 21 — were killed a day earlier in resumed fighting in the Shejaiyah area of northern Gaza.

The army is expected to wrap up operations in Rafah within weeks, the commander of one of the infantry brigades taking part in the Rafah operation told The Times of Israel and other reporters earlier this month.

Heavy fighting, meanwhile, has shifted north, where the army on Thursday launched a fresh operation in Shejaiya after noticing Hamas fighters regrouping in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood.

The IDF first operated in Shejaiya during the initial months of the ground offensive against Hamas, announcing that it had dismantled the terror group’s local battalion there in December. It last returned to the neighborhood in April, as the military shifted its operations in the Strip to intelligence-based targeted raids.

The army said Sunday that dozens of Hamas sites in Shejaiya were struck by drones over the past day, amid operations by the IDF’s 98th Division.

Troops under the division located weapons, raided Hamas “combat complexes” — some of which were booby-trapped — and killed several gunmen.

In Rafah, the army said several terror operatives had been killed and tunnel shafts demolished over the past day.

Battles are also ongoing in the Netzarim corridor in central Gaza, where the army has established a base of operations meant to maintain security control over the territory and halt Hamas movement between the southern and northern parts of the Strip.

Israeli officials have said that the army has defeated all but four Hamas battalions in the Gaza Strip — two in the southern city of Rafah, and two more in central Gaza.

War in Gaza erupted on October 7 with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel’s south, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 37,800 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.

Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.