An IDF Solider holding an Israeli flag. Photo: IDF.

Israel Defense Forces’ Lt.-Col. Dolev Keidar is the highest-ranking officer to be killed in Operation Protective Edge to thwart Hamas rocket fire and tunneling into Israel.

On Sunday, he warned his troops to “watch out for the tunnels,” according to a video report on Israel’s Ynet News site.

He leaves behind a wife, Michal, and three children.

Keidar, 38, of the city of Modi’in, commanded the “Geffen” battalion, and was “killed by (an) anti-tank missile fired at a force” on Monday, the army said in a statement. “IDF soldiers at the scene immediately responded and eliminated the terrorist squad who executed the attack,” the statement read.

Michal, a video producer, in 2009, prepared a video of his experience as an IDF officer and their life together, entitled, “Awaiting Him,” which focused on the families senior Israeli officers leave behind when they put on their uniforms and head for their bases, or battle.

Watch the trailer of Awaiting Him:

In one segment, recorded years earlier in Gaza, when he was a younger officer, he warned “we have to be prepared for situations like when we have to leave our people in the field.”

“Coping with the ‘alone,’ both as a woman, and as a mother, was extremely hard,” she says in the aching film, which has now become her reality.

“I never understood how all the bereaved women in the military neighborhood around me didn’t scream at their husbands to ‘quit the army, already.'”

An officer who served under Keidar said, “he didn’t care about rank. He valued and appreciated anyone who carried his weight. He had a sunny, upbeat disposition, and was a professional, by any standard.”

Watch the video here: