I last saw Hisham Ibrahim with the rank of lieutenant on his shoulders, emerging in a Sufa jeep to the operations room of the 7th Brigade headquarters, then at Geshur camp in the Golan Heights. The days are the days of the millennium and the IDF is in the process of capitulating from Lebanon. Hisham is the commander of the 82nd Battalion, and I am a liaison in the tank crew of Brigade Commander Yaakov Ayesh; I'm already a veteran and a bit unemployed, and in between I'm responsible for distributing training aids to battalions – figure and half-figure targets for shooting ranges, NCOs for battalion commanders, and even VCRs and slide launchers. With all this goodness, Hisham was at my mercy.
But now, with the rank of brigadier general, he stops in front of me in the parking lot of the Bar-Lev camp in Kastina in a white jeep and picks me up on a drive to the armored headquarters in the Gaza war. For 27 years he has been following in the footsteps of the "colosses" left by the larvae of the tanks, carving the way from the Mark 2B chariot launched in the Shalag War to Merkava 4 "Barak", which now roams the streets of Gaza. At least for me it seems natural and a bit fateful that he is the chief armored officer, the senior commander in the force, especially now, in the intensity of the campaign.
Two weeks after Black Saturday, Ibrahim was slated to leave the NGO office for a new and challenging position, head of the Civil Administration – in fact, for the first time away from tank command. But October 7th reset everything. "I would resign and go back to being commander of Tank 1B in some company in the field," he says emphatically when asked what would have happened if he had now been out of the force.
In recent days, he has been hopping between the brigade headquarters scattered in the south and the armored forces inside Gaza, and his conclusion is unequivocal: "This is the Armored Corps' finest hour. In the first days of the war, after the surprise of October 7, we were the armor of the people of Israel, we stopped the continuation of the massacre. Now - we are the spearhead of the ground maneuver. We kill the terrorists at the edge, the tanks are ready, the readiness is high, we are the most effective firepower on land."
These words are not empty of meaning. There seems to be no frame coming from the fighting in Gaza that does not include a significant mass of tanks in the area. The tank is the symbol of war, and even in a hyper-technological age, which sanctifies new symbols, it is difficult to find a more distinctive symbol than it. Yet his dissonance is built-in: he is always at the front but never "at the front", lacking agility and yet necessary for any subterfuge. Its fighters are unknown inside the turret, with the tank, the vessel itself, moving through the terrain almost as a human being, while its four men, an armored war quartet, operate it with necessary timing and synchronization. The tank and tankist are one.
In this campaign, tanks are everywhere. In the photographs they are seen moving and defensive, heavy vessels en masse, safe and quiet bands until they breathe fire. When I point out to Ibrahim our dilemma in the system, and the fact that despite the desire to diversify the newspaper cover image every day, we end up with 80 percent pictures of tanks, he smiles and says: "Not enough, raise it to 90 percent."
Ibrahim is an officer in a metamorphosis, in his youth he was considered a commander with a "knife between the teeth", including stories of heroism as a company commander in Defensive Shield and later as a battalion commander in Protective Edge. But senior command brings perspective to the vast processes and gray areas that push black and white to the extremes. Driving south, in the jeep, the shy and improvising Hisham I remember already strikes me as the thinking, analytical commander that the IDF raises well, without compromising the killer character and the determination to achieve a goal.
In the past year and a half, he said, the Armored Corps has observed and delved deeply into the armored battles in the war in Ukraine, including an in-depth study of the drone threat and various "overhead" threats that were alien to traditional tank combat doctrine.
Just don't indulge in routine
But even the insights from Ukraine do not cover up the acute need for a return to basics, which has been made even more so in recent years. The basis of the armored training is bread and butter, and according to Ibrahim, the corps arrived at the current ground campaign in peak readiness. This means Sisyphean practice of techniques and operational movement of tanks at the platoon and company level until perfect execution. And that means tank drills that burden the lone soldier in routine, but are essential for emergencies – camouflage, combat with closed shelves, defensive command, day and night parking lot, caterpillar deployment and countless other actions that are talkative in armored unit activity.
Now they are confident and under very high operational tension, and with a sense of full control over their tools and forces. "When you're on a tank, driving and shooting, you're in high survival and protection, every tankist knows that. The casualties we have had so far in the maneuver have been in moments in between, when we are 'refilled' – filling up ammunition, stopping for a period of time. Hamas conducts surveillance all the time, looking for somewhere to harass when we are not mobile. Therefore, even when we are in a security position, we are very dynamic and aggressive."
IDF Spokesperson
He makes it clear that as chief armored officer, he sees himself as the head of maneuver for the army's armored combat vehicles. These are tanks, of course, but also "APCs" and "Eitan" armored personnel carriers. He defines the APC disaster, which was hit by an anti-tank missile and claimed the lives of 11 fighters of Givati's Sabra Battalion, as "unlucky" - a house that was supposedly cleansed of terrorists but in fact a terrorist who launched a missile emerged from it, which statistically should not have caused such a terrible result. The lessons have been learned, but the understanding that in war there is no vacuum and there will still be casualties, and more painful and scarring misfortune will follow, has also sharpened. "The IDF's advanced armored vehicle has proven itself in this war. We have enormous achievements that ten years ago would have exacted an unreasonable price of fatalities."
The biggest challenge is maintaining operational tension. Do not indulge in routine, nor dissolve alertness. It is precisely the morning orders, the passing of the wire in the cannon morning and evening, the TSP – the weekly treatment – that help in the uncertainty of war. According to Ibrahim, this is the secret to continuity. "In Defensive Shield, the fighters who collapsed after a while are the ones who lost physical fitness, so it's important to do a short stretching workout every day."
A different kind of heroism
The many years of practice and planning were irrelevant to the black morning of Simchat Torah. Because when preparedness is at the professional level and not at the level of national, collective and individual consciousness, disaster knocks on the door.
When WhatsApp with the horrifying news arrived, Ibrahim says, the armored commanders' action was individual, fast, as if by instinct. "The crews that galloped to the south were not organic, and sometimes came without tanks, only with M-16s and a desire to charge," he says. The plans were forgotten and gave way to the necessity of controlling and stopping the atrocity. The chaos of October 7 and 8 brought with it extraordinary stories of heroism, in their boldness and quantity, far exceeding even the rich corpus of courage of the Israeli Armored Corps.
For example, Bar Zonshein, a company commander in the 77th Battalion, who stayed on holiday at the March post on the Gaza border, with fighters from Golani's 51st Battalion. When the attack broke out, he began to move with a single tank, killing terrorists in the fields of Ein HaShlosha with a commander's MG, advancing to Nirim, where he also eliminated and ran over two other squads. When he hears over the radio about the plight of the Kissufim outpost, he orders an immediate break in his direction, but then his tank is hit by an anti-tank missile and becomes restricted. Sonshein continues for many more hours driving and improvising between the battle zones; When he was unloaded from the damaged tank, he entered the garage of a vehicle carrying a SWAT team on the way to Kissufim, and then joined another tank and Golani's Battalion Commander 51, who became his combat partner for an entire day, until Monday afternoon. In two and a half days of fighting, he said, they killed between 70 and 90 terrorists. "Where there was a tank, we managed to prevent a massacre," he said later.
At the same time, many other armored commanders descend by every means from the north and center to join the brutal battle of containment. A company commander in the 46th Battalion of the 401st Brigade travels with a tank company, on caterpillars, from the SWAT unit near Kibbutz Nachshonim to the surrounding communities. The tanks enter Kissufim and Nahal Oz, forcing the Hamas murderers to barricade themselves and, in effect, stop.
Nati, battalion commander of the 9th Battalion, comes straight south from home; On his cellphone, he quickly sends the tanks to the Golan Heights sector, and flies in a jeep with his command post to Kissufim. He fought as an infantryman for many hours. "The observers at the outpost, who survived, have been calling him 'our guardian angel' ever since," Ibrahim says.
Nati's 401st brigade commander, Col. Benny Aharon, realizes at 7 a.m. that something big is happening, reaches Tze'elim and from there to Nahal Oz. He sees a tank on the road, pulls the MATC out of it and rushes forward with the crew. He runs over terrorists on the way to Kibbutz Reim, barely reaches the party compound, and then the tank is finally broken. A casual civilian passing by with his car takes him for a ride to another tank, miles away. Aharon rushes on caterpillars to Bari and breaks through the booby-trapped gate to fight the kibbutz paths and fire shells at the terrorist-infested houses. In the evening, he arrives at another tank at the entrance to Sderot, shelling the police station in the city, which has been occupied. The shelling caused the building to burn, with its many terrorists, and ended a dramatic event that lasted for many hours.
Every soldier in the armored track learned and memorized about the Zvika Force, which destroyed dozens of Syrian tanks in the first days of the Yom Kippur War. In the legacy of combat in the corps there are many stories of commanders and crew members who jumped from one damaged tank to another capable tank. But in the past month, a different kind of heroic baggage has been added to the armored ethos in its scope and depth, and it seems that in the midst of the hustle and bustle of war, only the tip of the iceberg has been counted and documented so far.
"We grew up with the stories of how the armor turned the bowl upside down during the Yom Kippur War," says Ibrahim, "even on the black morning of October 7 we were there. Tanks of the 77th Battalion fought the terrorists who broke through the fences, until they ran out of shells and MG ammunition, and then moved on to run over terrorists as much as they could - until they were hit by missiles and killed. The fighters fell with indescribable heroism."
The magnitude of the hour, as expected from the surprise and shock, belonged to the tactical echelon, from the soldier to the battalion commander, as on Yom Kippur. Audacity and heroism were not a matter of combat method, but of devotion, entrepreneurship and subterfuge and wisdom. Perhaps the story that touches Hisham Ibrahim most is that of his friend in arms and the Druze community, Lt. Col. Salman Habeqa, commander of the 53rd Battalion of the 188th Brigade, who fell in the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday night last week.
On the morning of October 7, Habka hurried down from his home in Yanuh-Jat in the Galilee, straight to the Ze'elim, got on a tank and galloped to Kibbutz Be'eri. There, in coordination with Brigadier General Barak Hiram, commander of the 99th Division, he fired shells into houses with terrorists in them and moved on, from house to house, to free hostages. "I realized that when people in Bari heard the larvae of the tanks, suddenly they had a moment of security," Habka said after the fact in an interview published by the IDF Spokesperson, "The moment that burns into my memory is when I drive on the roads, and realize that I am going to enter an Israeli community where there are cowardly wrongdoers, who took advantage of the holiday and entered the community, killed, slaughtered and kidnapped children, the elderly and babies."
The battle in which he was killed inside Gaza also shows Habeqa's character. "Salman hears over the radio that the 13th Battalion commander needs assistance. It's not his sector at all, but he takes another tank with him and comes flanked to a ruse, fights and helps until he is killed by a mortar shell," Ibrahim says. The two were separated by more than a decade - Ibrahim was 46, Habaka was 33 when he died. "It was a much more special relationship than a battalion commander and a battalion commander, it's a very personal event for me."
On Friday, he went to the funeral in the mourning village of Yanuh, who three weeks earlier had lost Lt. Col. Alim Abdullah, and on the fresh grave he eulogized: "My beloved little brother, our Salman, tall with a charming smile, razor sharp and brave as a lion, always there to help and extend a hand to those in need. You come to the rescue to help a force in distress. It didn't take much, one contact call, 'We need help.'"
The Recruitment Threshold Challenge
Ibrahim doesn't necessarily fit the DNA of the classic armored officer. It is more accessible, trying to round the well-known "armored quad". At the entrance to the forward command base, soldiers, regulars and reservists who served under it in the past, approach it fearlessly, receive a hug, a short conversation. "The tank is a killing machine, and if you're not disciplined and tough the machine can kill you, but I think these values of armor can also be conveyed a little differently," he smiles.
He says that the proximity to the fighters gives him the opportunity to see the spirit and the soul right in the eyes. "Cadets in an armored officers' course send me a WhatsApp, 'Officer officers, when will they let us enter Gaza?' Other fighters who are in other activities also write to me demanding to participate in the fighting, and that says it all."
The Israeli flag next to a burnt house in Bari, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
He grew up in Maghar in a security family based on the values of love of the land and the people, three of his brothers serve on a permanent basis, some in very sensitive and high-quality positions. "All these years they joke that I'm the family's jobnik, but I tell them it's the other way around, it's a constant fight in the family."
He is married with four children, three daughters – a 19-year-old daughter and 17-year-old twins – and an 8-year-old boy with special needs who is "the light and shine of my life." On Saturdays, Ibrahim volunteers with AKIM, which he says gives him the "strength and mental strength" he needs in the crowded routine of life. The position of armored officer – sometimes the last position in the career of senior armored commanders – usually takes three years, but in Ibrahim's case, after a year he was already marked the way forward, up. "Wherever they need me, I'll be," he says.
The complex discourse in Druze society about the future – which predicts full integration into Western Israeli society, or maintaining traditionalism and sectarian segregation – occupies social leaders such as Ibrahim, who looks to villages and youth. His great struggle is to maintain the high rates of enlistment in the Druze community to the IDF. "This is not an easy task because there has been a negative erosion in recent years, even if it is small. And the problem is the lack of understanding that everything that happens in Israeli society directly affects Druze society. Thus the erosion of the ethos of warfare, so the Nation-State Law, and so the social divide in Jewish society. I used to not have to explain to a Druze boy why it's important to be a fighter, and today you have to invest in it."
According to him, the alternatives are divided according to gender – young women are on a very high academic rise, while among young people, "those who do not enlist face alternatives that are not necessarily good and positive. Once upon a time, when 60 or 70 officers left the village, they inevitably took good jobs and created a better and healthier society. We have to maintain that standard."
Advantage in every encounter
In the north, opposite Hezbollah, the armor relies almost exclusively on the reservists. "They challenge us with questions that are mature, courageous and full of openness," admits Ibrahim, "They have a lot to say, but they are all busy carrying out the task. 150 percent mobilization. In the first few weeks, we learned a lot from the South about the North, and that benefits us."
According to him, the tank accident that took the lives of Sergeant Major Yinon Fleischmann and Staff Sergeant Na'ran Eshhar was, according to him, an operational event during battle. "They fired at the post and they drove back to refuel. The driver said over the radio that he had no brakes and in the end they reached the cliff, they ran out of hinge. It's very unfortunate that people were killed in an accident and not when they were in direct threat to the enemy, but this is not a safety incident – they fell in combat."
He is full of appreciation for the reservists, and is sure that their missions in the future, after the war, will change and expand dramatically. In recent decades, the boundaries between tanks and infantry have blurred: the personal weapon of the armored fighters, the "cylinder" made of hard steel, has long since been replaced by a shortened M-16, and operational activity almost always did not include tanks. "It's going to change," Ibrahim says, "we'll go back to the tanks. I expect that the deployment on the borders will change significantly, and that the ground army in general will change its face – on the scale of weapons, the scope of regular and reserve forces. I am convinced that the reserve law will change, like after the Yom Kippur War."
"We will stay in Gaza as long as necessary"
We advance into the headquarters areas, enter the war rooms and the "front" of each brigade. At the entrance to the area of the 460th Training Brigade, which immigrated here from Shizafon, we meet two of the combat directors, Lt. Col. Yoav Amir and Lt. Col. Tal David.
They are both sleepless, but with a frenzy and poison in their eyes. It is said that the front provides the brigade commander inside Gaza with all the necessary envelope - from managing the fire system, through evacuating the wounded, to providing refueling and food to the fighters. Dozens of officers and soldiers, members of the Shin Bet, Air Force, artillery coordination, technology and intelligence, crowd into the war room. The feeling in the air is one of necessity and urgency. With a clap of the paw, the chief of staff silences everyone, if there is an encounter with fire that requires special attention.
IDF tanks near the Gaza Strip border. "Took advantage of the security situation," Photo: AP.
The plasmas are here, on the wall, but unlike in various cases in the past, the brigade commanders have been with the forces inside Gaza since the first day of the maneuver. "They eat tuna and see the terrorists eye to eye," Ibrahim says. "It has invaluable value. The same is true of the very high fitness of the tanks, including those damaged on 7 October that have already been rehabilitated and are fighting on the front. When you bring back a tank company in which your people were killed, it has tremendous emotional significance."
That doesn't mean you don't think ahead to the longer campaign. Two battalions of Merkava Mark 3, which have already been decommissioned, are now undergoing a process of readiness in readiness for the future.
Yoav and Tal function unabated as combat managers. They know the sector well from Operation Protective Edge, but according to them there is no comparison. "In Operation Protective Edge the objectives were limited, now the policy is free, this is war. This, of course, causes challenges vis-à-vis the population and the way fires are used in the area, but we are succeeding in this as well. We have an advantage in every encounter, and we win every encounter."
They are proud of the rapid transition, within a day or two, of a brigade designated for training and courses (all armored training tracks, from basic training to armored officers' course, are under the 460th Brigade) - to war mode and full readiness. At the same time, training is still taking place, and in early December, a new recruitment of armored personnel is expected. A motivational problem won't be there, Ibrahim says.
The same is true at the front of the 401st Brigade, a hundred steps away. The atmosphere is supreme, people move in fast motion, sometimes running. Colonel Hagai Amar, the brigade's chief of staff, meets us at the entrance to the war room.
He is a resident of Neve Tzuf, slender and agile, an armorer throughout the Ramach, grew up in the 188th Brigade and fought as a battalion commander in the Second Lebanon War and as a battalion commander in Cast Lead. In the previous decade he commanded the Harel Brigade and the Tactical Training Center, and now, in the reserves, he takes care of being the back of Brigade Commander Benny Aharon.
On the morning of the holiday, he received a phone call and went to wake up his fighting son, Gilad. "I told him, 'Get up, there's a war,'" he says. As a staff chief, he is required for all possible sectors of the brigade, multitasking under fire. The brigade commanders, always reservists, are a special people, necessarily scratched, bursting with energy regardless of age. In the 7th Brigade UAVs, I remember the chief of staff telling us for days, "Don't eat, it sharpens our senses." We looked at him like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now.
Amar Kurtz of this enthusiastic breed. His eyes sparkle as he points to the screen and escorts the brigade's movement in the Shati refugee camp. On the morning of the massacre, he says, the 52nd Armored Battalion left the tanks behind, boarded rhino planes at Ramat David, on jeeps, and entered Moshav Yachini to fight as infantry.
Now they've been on the tanks, for two weeks now. "It's a war machine, we're razor-sharp," he clarifies, "a regular, skilled and trained brigade, and the regular brigade works in full synergy with the reserves, the air force and the navy's bees."
He himself does 70-60 reserve days a year, and the Big Bang brings out the best in him. "With the previous brigade commander, I went down on a cruise to Ashdod in order to get to know the territory of Gaza. It's no stranger to me. We know how to close circles well, and we killed dozens of terrorists a week. We exposed rocket and IED manufacturing facilities, and dealt without much trouble with terrorists firing at us at the Qatari hospital, as well as the tunnels coming out of mosques. The division paved a gravel road from the Gaza border inward, and we refuel, provide ammunition and food. The spirit of the warriors is strong."
The tanks are closed in the turret for days on end, opening a door sparingly and breathing air only rarely. This requires the intimacy of four staff members, at all hours of the day, including the most personal and revealing moments. "In Cast Lead I was a battalion commander and we fought for ten days with shelves closed," says Amar, "In the end, the armored personnel defeat this difficulty. We will stay in Gaza as long as necessary."
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