Bayli Dukes, 28-29, is a Canadian who was born in Winnipeg and grew up in Toronto. A 2018 profile in The Times of Israel states that she was raised “in a very Zionist environment” and that joining the Israeli military was her “dream from the age of 12.” Dukes graduated from Tiferes Bais Yaakov, a private Jewish high school, in 2014.

She went on to study biology at York University in Toronto, but in December 2016 decided to immigrate to Israel through the Garin Tzabar program. Dukes told The Canadian Jewish News (CJN), “I kept hearing about all these horrible things that are happening, all the terrorists attacks, and it was just making me feel so helpless and like I couldn’t help, and all I wanted to do was help and make things better.”

Three months after arriving, Dukes joined the Israeli military as a combat soldier in the Caracal Battalion. CJN reported, “For most of her service, the battalion has been patrolling the Egyptian border, although it moved to the Ayosh area north of Jerusalem five months ago and will return to the Egyptian border in a few weeks.”

In September 2018, Dukes was awarded the Israeli military’s Award of Excellence for the Southern Command by Herzl Halevi, who was the chief of general staff from January 2023 to January 2025, and was described by The Economist as “leading Israel’s war in Gaza.” Dukes’ field commander described one of the reasons for her receiving the award: “As [Ron] Peretz recalls it, Dukes threw a grenade that caused her gun to ricochet backwards and hit her in the head. She had a huge bruise around her eye and the medic wanted to send her home, but Dukes insisted on stay in training.”

Dukes’ award was celebrated in a newsletter of a Toronto synagogue, the Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto, which has links to several other soldiers included in this database.

Dukes’ Facebook page states that she has been a mortgage agent at Nuburrow, a mortgage broker in Vaughan, Ont., since 2022, and that she graduated from a linguistics program at York University in 2021.