Front seat to the show

Who better to tell you what’s going on in Gaza than the IDF soldiers? The Israeli army is unique. Its soldiers are civilians called up to serve, some a whole lifetime after they were first in the army. And they serve to defend the land of Israel. So when the Jewish nation is under attack, the whole country feels the effort, because every single family is affected by war.

“Real heroes don’t wear capes” - that’s what it says at the entrance to the ward I visited today at the Sheba Tel HaShomer hospital. They don’t wear capes, they wear casts and bandages, and in a few months some will wear IDF uniforms again. I walked into a hospital today but it wasn’t like any other hospital I’ve ever visited. It was full of life; outdoor areas with instruments and games, volunteers bringing amazing food, visitors coming in from all over the world with drawings and notes from Jews throughout the diaspora. It’s a place where the injured rock stars of the IDF are getting medical treatment for their wounds from Gaza.

As I was milling around waiting for two soldiers to tell me their stories, released hostage Mia Schem walked past me, looking bright and relaxed. I didn’t ask questions, but was told that every hostage who comes back from Gaza is offered outpatient treatment for their psychological health at their own discretion whenever they want it. It’s their choice. Mia was here to get her arm treated. Sheba takes in 70-80% of the injured soldiers. I asked for the percentage of the injured who are reserves, but I didn’t get a clear answer. I was told that many reserves come for treatment here.

I met Itamar. He’s a 26-year-old computer science student, and a captain in the IDF reserves. He lives in Bet Shemesh. At 10am on October 7, Itamar knew he had to go to his unit to prepare for war. At that point nobody understood the amount of damage in Israel. They heard there were dozens of terrorists in the country, not thousands. He brought his laptop with him, hoping he’d be able to spend his waiting time studying. But at 6pm, his unit started preparations for a ground offensive in Gaza. For three weeks, they became game ready. Their mission was to fight in Gaza, entering on October 27, immediately discovering that there were more terrorists there than anticipated. His unit killed 200 terrorists in the first week. Itamar was responsible for 36 soldiers. One fell in battle. “The war is scary,” he said. “But a healthy scary.” A scary that keeps you vigilant. “It’s a shitty war, in a shitty place,” he said, describing the treacherous pursuit of Hamas terrorists in both overground and underground levels. “They had 18 years to prepare for this war,” he said. “Fucking crazy!”

“There isn’t a neighborhood in Gaza that doesn’t have tunnel shafts.” At night they would be fighting, from every range possible. Itamar almost died a few times.

In Jabalia, during a difficult fight, he injured three of his fingers on his right hand. One of his soldiers told him to leave to get his hand fixed, but Itamar stayed with his men. After he announced he would stay, his soldiers –relieved – told him that the thought of Itamar leaving was their “toughest moment in the war”. Itamar never dealt with civilians in Gaza, only terrorists dressed as civilians. He cannot fathom that the amount of weapons they were targeted with were all produced inside Gaza.

To secure themselves for some rest, the unit would build camps inside Gaza, and surround themselves with bulldozers. On November 3, the mood in the camp was OK. Some cigarettes had come in from outside, and they were protected enough in their camp that they “could take a crap outside instead of doing it in a bag inside the army vehicle”. Itamar went to sleep at 4am having had no rest for 48 hours. He was sleeping outside the vehicle with his gun strapped to his chest, and he woke up from a blast of mortars at sunrise. The men went into their vehicle and closed all the hatches. They went back to sleep. At 7.30am, Itamar woke up to screaming. Another blast. There was ash in the air, and a smell of burning blood. He felt hot iron cutting into his body, and pat himself down to understand the damage. He found blood gushing from his hip. His arm and ankle were also hit. He saw one of his men next to him, with shrapnel in his heart and neck. “Oh fuck! My soldier is dead,” he recalled.

He was in shock. There was an injured soldier next to him, and Itamar snapped out of his fugue state to get him two tourniquets, for both legs. He saved his life, even as his own hip bled heavily. The unit were outside the vehicle as other IDF tanks shot at Hamas to protect the wounded soldiers. “The paramedic ran towards me like a tiger,” he said, remembering how he jumped on her vehicle. Both Itamar and the other soldier were saved. Itamar didn’t take painkillers. He thought he’d lose his leg, or die. “I don’t want painkillers to knock me out. I want to be awake for my last hours,” he laughed.

Itamar has had six surgeries. He will go back to Gaza in a month. Itamar doesn’t “want” to be in Gaza. He wants to surf and swim in the ocean. But he won’t leave his men in a war he considers to be the most justified war in Israel’s history.

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Then there was Aaron, from Long Island. Aaron got married four months ago. He came to Israel as a lone soldier having woken up in a suite in Vegas on October 7, where he was attending a tech conference. Aaron has a start-up and lives in Tel Aviv. He served 14 years ago. He was called up on October 8. On October 30, Aaron was part of the first wave of soldiers going into Gaza. He was prepared for this battle but was still astounded by what ensued. It was unlike anything he could have conceived. He describes Gaza as “a playground for terror”. All of the North of the strip is apocalyptic. “It looks like Mordor and it feels like the upside down.” The hope for a two state solution disappeared for him in Gaza. The hope for a peaceful one state solution that includes the Gazans also evaporated.

“Gaza has no structure – other than terror,” he says. “It was built to facilitate attacks on Israel.” Aaron said that for every 20 houses, 19 are affiliated with terror. He found grenade launchers in a child’s closet. “As a New Yorker: what the fuck?!” The sole focus of the Gazan civilians is martyrdom. “You go into their houses and there’s no artwork on the walls. There’s no sense of love beyond religious fanaticism, or Hamas. They have pictures of martyrs on walls, or etchings of Israel but with the word ‘Palestine’, or family portraits of them holding AK-47s. They are groomed for terror and hate.” During his time in Gaza, he found six tunnel shafts. Finding the initial shafts were his best moments. “I was sitting in lemon groves and I lit a cigar while we bombed these tunnels. It set the tone.”

One day they were crossing a path by an UNRWA school that the IDF had already been in. There were remaining question marks about the school being left to stand. The soldiers were exposed and their commander was shot dead by a sniper who was hidden by the school. Hamas had AK-47s and a sniper behind the school. “They’re terrible soldiers. They just wait for mistakes from us, and they capitalize.” Aaron’s instinct was to do the right thing and try to save his commander. But as he gathered his body, the sniper shot him in the leg. He thought he’d lost his leg. He fell to the ground, understanding that none of his fellow unit could expose themselves to save him, so he saved himself, by crawling.

Itamar and Aaron filled me with joy and hope today. I thought I was turning up to do that for them. In turn they gave me medicine. Real heroes don’t wear capes.

Last week I went to the Erez crossing to a very special IDF base. This is why it’s special. It’s not a combat base. It’s a humanitarian aid base, and it was attacked on October 7.

It’s one thing to see rows and rows and villages of burned down houses, it’s another to go inside one of the bordering IDF army bases and witness the destruction. So as I said, this is a base that exists to bring aid from Israel to Gaza. That was true before October 7 and it is true since October 7. Before October 7, 18,500 people from Gaza would come here every day via the crossing along the fence. In Israel, the workers entering in daily could earn five times the salary in Israel that they made in Gaza. Recently Israel wanted to increase the number to 20,000 permits for Gazans. So say in every one of those households there were five people, we are talking about helping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

This area of the IDF is part of COGAT and the particular base pictured here is responsible for the Gaza Strip. In Kerem Shalom - another base nearby - 500 trucks would go every day to Gaza before October 7, including food, water and building supplies. They would also receive exports from Gaza for the Palestinians to gain from, mainly textiles and agricultural goods. This base is also responsible for international projects to rebuild and improve infrastructure in Gaza to better the lives of Palestinians. But on October 7, Hamas decided none of that was important. They targeted this base, in particular. Hamas sacrificed all this good will from Israel by breaking into this base on October 7 and creating this:

The IDF spokesperson here was not allowed to tell me about the Golani soldiers who once slept in these barracks. Now the task here on this base has changed. Here, the IDF assess the humanitarian crisis in Gaza every day: do they have water and food etc? 10-20% of the aid is taken by Hamas. Every day they are in contact with all UN agencies to get the aid in that they are given. In the media you will read a lot of reporting around hunger in Gaza, but what you don’t know is that this narrative also existed on October 6. It has always been the case that if the Gazans wanted more, they could have more. Keren Shalom can bring up to 1,000 trucks a day. It’s also Egypt’s responsibility but nobody talks about that. UN agencies are supposed to provide assistance where needed whether it’s UNRWA or the WFP. For a neighboring state at war to do this is unheard of. Is Russia giving humanitarian aid to Ukraine? Of course not.

On October 7, hundreds of rockets fired into this base at 6.30am. Many on base went into the safe room and luckily held fort and survived. The tunnels that were unearthed on this border if given a few more months would have extended right beneath this base. As I left the Erez crossing, I passed an IDF engineer originally from California, who was taking a break from the tunnel. “My job right now is to try to figure out how to blow that shit up”.

Israel and the Gaza Strip have some serious trust issues. But if the world continues to refuse to understand what Israel has learned about Gaza and its people in the last three months, the trust issues will lie beyond Middle Eastern borders.