The father of a former soldier in the elite Maglan unit described the abuse his son experienced during his military service.
In an interview with News 2's First Edition, the father said, "He found himself crawling hundreds of meters when he was seriously wounded."
"My son still suffers trauma," he revealed. "He fell into an environment with the violent and aggressive mentality of talk where they come down on each other in the most brutal way; he didn't cooperate and was immediately marked as a scapegoat."
The father said after his son was injured his commanders abused him instead of transferring him for medical treatment. "He was injured in one of the exercises; he knew that in this unit you don't ask for sick leave. His injury was dressed and he continued on wounded. The commander decided that my son didn't ask his authorization for the bandage and ordered him in the middle of the night to remove the dressing. My son, who was already wounded, found himself crawling hundreds of meters, critically injured, getting banged up on the boulders, and everything he went through caused him very serious injuries."
During the crawl, the son lost his kippah and asked the commander permission to go back and find it. "He found it in the middle of the night. The commander asked him, 'How did you find it?' He said, 'Through the trail of blood I left.' The commander answered him with a smutty reference.
The son continued his training for another week and ended up in the clinic, seriously injured. "They had to remove his clothes by special means, because everything was a mixture of cloth, flesh, and pus."
"Apart from the doctrine of fighting in the field, Maglan has a public relations doctrine," the father said. "They've turned themselves into a symbol of the Israel Defense Forces and Israel's security. I highly appreciate their work at the combat level, but this is a unit whose norms are very problematic."
The IDF Spokesman's Office said in response: "The incident that took place more than a year ago was examined by the soldier's commanders and the soldiers' community commissioner. The investigation shows that in a number of isolated incidents the norm was exceeded, especially in the training process. In light of this, the team commander and the staff sergeant were severely reprimanded. As for medical care it emerges that the sergeant received good medical care.
"The Maglan unit is an elite operational unit that performs high quality activity and yearly trains professional fighters of the highers caliber after a difficult and challenging employment. It should be noted that the commander of the team recently led fighters in incidents under fire with great success."
