
An IDF soldier in Gaza speaks of enemy attempts to kidnap soldiers into tunnels, the special boost that letters from back home give him and his friends, the incredible motivation displayed by his comrades-in-arms, and more.
Aryeh, a former hesder yeshiva student and a soldier in reserves who spent a week fighting terrorists deep inside northern
Email readers: click here to listen to the IDF soldier from Gaza
Excerpts:
I’ve been in
The army was very tight with us about security – they took away our cell phones, made sure we don’t have cameras, etc.
No Atheists in Foxholes
[Asked what it is like when they actually enter
When we actually went in, it was very surreal. On the Israeli side, even with all the rockets and shells falling around us, you sort of feel safe - but when you cross over, you feel like you have left the safe cover of
Fear of Being Snatched
But even more scary is the fact that there are tunnels everywhere in
The Old-Man-and-the-Cane Trick
The top Hamas guys are dug-in and hiding pretty well under hospitals and schools, and they don’t even know what’s going on outside. We’ve cut their phone lines, including cell phones, and they communicate by sending children with notes to each other; we’ve caught kids carrying notes. We once saw an old man hobbling down the street with a cane, looking very bent over and wretched, and when he saw Israeli soldiers, he suddenly threw away the cane, ran over to them and tried to blow himself up on them; the soldiers were able to shoot him first.
No Concern for Life
The mindset of the enemy is so alien to us; by us, the death of any one soldier is terrible, a national tragedy – but by them, it seems that they want as many deaths as possible. In
We Want to Finish the Job
The soldiers’ morale is very high, and all of them definitely believe that the war is just and important. No one likes fighting; people want to be with their families. I’ve seen some 35-year-old guys almost crying about how much they miss their families – but at the same time, no one wants to leave now. Of all sectors, it’s the soldiers who do not want a ceasefire, not because we want to fight but because we know the job is not finished yet. We don’t want to have to go back again in a year or two or three. The soldiers want to stay and finish the job, they really do… I think there has to be a hard push against Hamas, even harder than we have done until now; this will take a real sacrifice, we know - but to think that we might leave and the rockets will still fall, what did we do??! Killing 900 terrorists out of 20,000 is just not enough, we have to really decimate their ranks in order that they should know that they should leave us alone…
True,
We Feel the Hand of G-d
Well, I would say that everyday religion is one thing; we take things for granted, we pray every day, some people concentrate more and some concentrate less… But here – you live it, you absolutely live it. Secular soldiers are whispering prayers, everyone wants G-d to be there, and we do feel it - we have seen the hand of G-d; we have been very fortunate, you can see it and feel it... Even though we’re often hungry, the first thing a lot of soldiers go for in the packages that is not the food, but rather the letters and words of support. You can’t imagine what it does for us to read them… I have about nine of the really special ones, and when I had a little time, I would go over to some corner and pull them out and read them… They give so much strength…
I just want to tell this really special story that happened to me: Some of the letters have phone numbers on them, so I called one of them to thank her for her letter - an 8-year-old girl named
Click here to listen to Aryeh’s entire talk.