A doctor in the midst of the Boulder attack: ‘This did not come out of vacuum’
An Israeli-American doctor cared for victims on the scene after an attacker flung Molotov cocktails
An FBI team at the scene in Boulder, Colorado, after a June 1 attack left several people with burns and other injuries. Photo by Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman June 3, 2025
At the initial flash, Dr. Yonatan Gold knew exactly what was happening.
The Boulder pediatrician was taking part in a march in support of the Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza. Most weeks since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Gold has joined the demonstrators, part of a movement called Run for Their Lives, who walk in silence toward the courthouse. “We’re not trying to be political or antagonistic,” he said. “We want people to know there are still hostages, and these people need to be freed.”
This past Sunday, as the marchers stopped to recite the names of the hostages, Gold noticed a man, standing a short distance away, wearing what looked like a plastic tank strapped to his back.
“I thought that’s strange, but I just didn’t pay much attention to the guy,” Gold told me when I reached him by phone Tuesday.
Then there was a flash.
The man had thrown a Molotov cocktail. It exploded in the middle of the crowd of about 40 marchers. The husband and wife walking beside Gold, a couple in their 80s, caught fire and fell to the ground.
Gold and others dropped to the ground, too, rolling their bodies against the couple to snuff out the flames. The husband was burned from his feet to his hips. Every part of his wife’s body was burned, including her hair and eyebrows.
Gold knelt beside her, identified himself as a doctor, then poured water on her to cool her down.
“I didn’t have any equipment,” he said. The woman was conscious. She called out to her husband, who called back out to her. Gold assured her he would wait beside her until the ambulance arrived.
Authorities arrested Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, an Egyptian immigrant whose visa had expired, at the scene, where they also discovered dozens of unused Molotov cocktails. He told police he wanted to “kill all Zionists.” Among the charges he faces: committing a hate crime.
As harrowing as the experience was, Gold, who is an Israeli citizen, said it wasn’t surprising.
“This did not come out of vacuum, this attack,” he said, “and I fear that other attacks will occur.”
Gold, 68, first traveled to Israel in 1974 after finishing high school in Alabama. He made aliyah, and served in the IDF. In the 2000s, he moved back to the United States after over three decades in Israel to pursue post-doc studies at Johns Hopkins University and take care of aging parents.
During the Boulder Run for Their Lives marches since Oct. 7, Gold said, some people shout encouragement and support to the marchers — some of whom are not Jewish — and others would yell angrily at the mostly-silent vigil.
“They yelled, ‘Ceasefire!’ in the beginning. Then it became ‘Genocide!’” he said. “We see the rhetoric slowly rolling toward more and more extreme things.”
The growing extremism, hostility and division since Oct 7 has left him feeling politically homeless.
Before Oct. 7, Gold, who is on his synagogue’s security committee, consulted with the local mosque on their security needs.
“We felt very much that both our communities were potential targets, we were concerned about white nationalists,” he said.
Now, he says, allies he made through efforts like that have cut off contact.
Still, there have been continuing efforts at interfaith dialogue in Boulder since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, including a four-part play series at University of Colorado, Boulder, designed to promote Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.
Gold, who volunteered in Israel as a doctor following Oct. 7, has found himself not on board with those on the left who scream genocide; or with the current policies of the Israeli government; or with the agenda of many on the right, despite their support for Israel.
“Many of us who served in various capacities have a real hard time politically” with the current government, he said. “But our focus is, end the war and get the hostages out.”
Those like him — who don’t fit neatly in any one camp when it comes to the war — are “ in many ways the wandering Jews,” he said.
That’s in part why Gold and others have focused on the hostages, through efforts like Run for Their Lives. That cause, he said, should supersede politics.
After the May 21 murder of two staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., Run for Their Lives organizers announced they would pause the marches on security grounds. Gold said the Boulder group decided to go ahead with their weekly vigil.
“The immediate reaction amongst us was, we are going to walk,” he said.
He’s not sure if the marches — which draw participants from across the political spectrum — have much effect when it comes to swaying politicians or the public. But he knows they comfort the families of the hostages. After the attack, one of the participants received an email from the mother of Omer Neutra, an American-Israeli hostage murdered by Hamas. She wanted to check on the victims and see if they were alright — even, said Gold, in the midst of her own personal pain.
I asked him if he thought the shock of the attack would lead people to temper their rhetoric and tone down the vitriol.
“No,” said. “Look what happened with Sandy Hook” — the 2012 shooting at a Connecticut elementary school that killed 26 people. “We saw what happened with guns, right? The most radical things that you could not even have imagined, that you would think would shake a community and shake a nation, shook the nation for five minutes.”
The extreme rhetoric grows. And it’s the nature of prejudice, said Gold, not to see any difference within groups.
“Many of the lines have started to blur between what’s Israeli and what’s Jewish, and what’s good and what’s bad,” he said.
Gold said he understands the pain and anger those who oppose Israel feel. But, after Sunday, he now has a firsthand sense of how dark and destructive those feelings can get.
“On the one hand, you’re sympathetic. You listen to other people’s pain and try to understand and empathize,” he said. “On the other hand, it leads to someone throwing two Molotov cocktails.”
