It is possible to start with the ruins of the settlement of Nissanit in the northern boundary of the Gaza Strip. When units of the 14th Brigade entered, they discovered that Hamas had turned the concrete ruins of the community into crazy weapons depots. And half a kilometer to the north, Israeli settlers live in a suburban illusion and fly peace kites. Not far away is the whole Erez Crossing complex. The complex became an operational departure base for armored units.
From there, the 14th Brigade Commander, Col. Tal Alkobi, led his tanks and infantry units, with close air support, to take over Hamas' Palestine outpost. This was an important cognitive goal. The attack at the beginning of the ground maneuver was led by the 79th Battalion Commander, with the brigade commander joining him as the MATC. This time the exercise worked: carrying out an operation of massive tank fire on the target; Hamas terrorists descend to the fortified burrows; Then the air force comes with heavy bombardment and collapses the tunnels on the terrorists.
There were more than 100 terrorists on the target. "After the tanks and the D-Nines came the infantry, the plasters and the diamond unit. This is not the classic battle we were preparing for. It's not a built-up area, it's a military target in every respect. Fortunately, our veteran reservists still remember similar targets in Syria," the brigade commander said.
Galant: "The next phase of the maneuver has begun" // Photo: Ariel Hermony, Ministry of Defense
The infantry fighters who mopped up the trenches of the Palestine outpost did it as the IDF would have done in the distant past fighting for targets such as Ammunition Hill. The name of the target was changed from the Palestine post to the Yuval outpost, after the officer who fell there in battle, the late Lieutenant Yuval Zilber.
When we met the 79th Battalion commander about a kilometer and a half inside the Gaza Strip, outside his Mark 3 tank, he said: "Do you realize what it is? Drive from 0 to 200 km/h. No one prepared for such a thing. I feel like I'm going back to normal. Whatever you want to call it, it's called war. You're forced to carve out an entire neighborhood."
Looking from the shelter of the Hamra mound, you can see the Abu Samra neighborhood. Some of the openings are balconies, but most of them are holes in tank fire, which identified squads of tank hunters on the upper floors who tried to position themselves and fire anti-tank missiles, but were eliminated before they could do so.
The fighters are on the ground. 14th Brigade, Photo: IDF Spokesperson
Alkobi arrived at the Tze'elim base on Saturday, October 7. The next day he did what he never believed would ever happen. "I'm leading a 70-something tank avenue on a mission to restore the situation to normal. Take down 40 terrorists. They fire mortars at us. What wins in the early days is the unions of forces, entering dangerous places without thinking twice. The sights made my heart really hard. But it's power. Before every operation, I go to the observation room. It gives me strength."
This time, too, before I crawled into the tank, we went up to the observation room at Erez Crossing. Staff members of the military rabbinate crawled on all fours to scrub the remains of the massacre according to some standard, the stains that were still visible on the walls and floors a month and a half later. After such a visit to the victims' rooms, it is easier to send the queen of battle, the terrible D-9, to open a new street in the neighborhoods of the towns and refugee camps of the northern Gaza Strip – in accordance with the battle plan.
Col. Alkobi notes that the Erez Crossing Unit is the height of irony. This year they received the Southern Command shield as an outstanding unit of liaison and coordination for their contribution to promoting cooperation and quiet in the sector, or something like that. 17,<> workers entered Israel every day from Gaza. The mobile electric gate that was hijacked by an RPG and hacked will testify. The concrete wall that was breached near one of the pillbox towers by an IED will also be testified. The perforated shield walls, where soldiers taking shelter from rocket fire were shot; And the rest of the stuff that is sizzling in the air but is already starting to disperse. The brigade's fighters are clearing rubble on their own initiative, and when you escort them into the Gaza Strip, you clearly feel that the center of gravity of all the goodness and beauty of Israeli society is now on the line, in positions in the cursed soil of the Gaza Strip.
Tank in the Gaza Strip, photo: IDF Spokesperson
The tank cuts through strawberry fields, stops, and the soldiers jump into onion beds. In front of us is an agricultural valley that was infested with mortar positions and launchers.
On the aggravation mound suddenly appear coffee cups. Someone, and I don't remember who, made excellent coffee inside the tank. All around are the sounds of war. Tank fire that seems to be coming from behind us, heavy artillery fire, enemy rocket fire and interceptions that make a close and terrifying explosion. Beyond the hilly ridge that was once the Palestine outpost, where many Hamas consciousness videos were filmed, small arms bursts can be heard. It is reported that the neighboring brigade now has more than ten wounded.
In addition to battles for control posts in the area, there were random encounters with terrorist squads. In one, seven terrorists were ambushed. "I see the infantry charging in. I shoot at the MG, I shoot cones," the brigade commander said. "Suddenly, someone appeared next to a tree. He picked up an RPG in front of me about 50 meters away from me. I managed to shoot him with the commander's machine gun first." The ambush until the terrorists were eliminated was conducted by the 79th Battalion Commander in perfect cooperation with the MASC. The pilots commit suicide in favor of the ground forces and identify problems and targets from a normal perspective. The battalion commander describes a situation in which a pilot identified the problem of the force, and without references or indication of the force's targets, saw him fire two missiles at a short distance by them and end the story.
Col. Alkobi and Amnon Lorde, Photo: IDF Spokesperson
"The artillery fire you see and hear - I whitewashed them fifteen minutes ago," notes the 79th Battalion commander. "I guess that's what we're hearing and seeing now."
"The enemy is exhausted, it has many dead. We don't feel that he is able to produce anything significant," says Alkobi.
What do you do now with a cardboard cup with leftover coffee? The instinct of someone who came from the big city is to look for a garbage dump or trash can. "Throw it away already," someone told me. Who cares about an empty cup of coffee when shooting.
About a month before the outbreak of the war, on the occasion of the rally of the 14th Brigade in Latrun, Col. Tal Elkobi released a letter to his soldiers and veterans of the brigade from the Yom Kippur and First Lebanon Wars. A shiver passes when one reads the prophetic letter that Alkobi wrote to his soldiers entitled "This time it is our turn." "Today, 50 years after (Yom Kippur), we stand in a place where complacency and arrogance occupy a prominent place in the Israeli consciousness," wrote the 36-year-old brigade commander. At the end of the letter he wrote, not believing that it was really going to happen: "This time it's our turn, we must be prepared for the worst, only this way will we win!"
"Home front - important. In order for me to be strong here, the home front has to be strong behind me," one of the officers told me, "There are families of reservists with children in anxiety, children in trauma. The soldiers' stay at home is for home, not for me or for the soldiers. The children and the wife need to breathe you."
According to what you hear in the armored units, the IDF enters the war with a shortage of tanks. "There was an economic outlook," said a senior officer. "A tank is a very expensive tool, and they decided, 'I'll sell tanks.' They didn't believe in this threat. They didn't believe that a threat on the scale of Yom Kippur could materialize." Another thing that has been discovered is that the reserve units know how to quickly return to full fitness. In the case of a particular engineering unit, it did not do reserve duty and, as a result, did not train for six years. Two weeks of training before the war and the waiting period before the ground operation brought it back to the level of a regular unit.
Meanwhile, 14 eliminated other Hamas compounds with names like "Hamsa Hamsa" and "Pistachio House." You often hear the saying "now we speak Arabic," a language that "they" understand. The brigade is already preparing for new missions.
On the way back orchards laden with oranges. Trees with wild fruits that look similar, cactus hedges laden with severs that look ripe, maybe already after the season. And an airlift of pizzas. An elderly man parks with his car and pushes family cardboard cases into the windows of soldiers' vehicles. At Gilat Bombamala junction of burgers and couscous. Smoke rises from the hill. A handwritten sign points left to the Shakshuka platoon - free for soldiers. To the stand of unconditional love - drive straight.
American Time
The fear of the war expanding to the northern front and beyond may cause Washington to give Israel all the time it needs to destroy Hamas-ISIS in Gaza
The fire that develops in the north into a war of attrition with some 70,<> hostages who retreated from the northern settlements to the center of the country indicates one thing: American deterrence is dysfunctional, or has a very limited effect. The Americans do not frighten Hezbollah, which carries out harsh operations against Israel. The same goes for deterrence against Iranian militias that fire missiles at Israel, and in Iraq and Syria they attack American bases.
The reason is that the Americans continue their policy of appeasement towards Iran by other means. An Iranian general said the Americans were "turning to us" and "asking us." "The Americans are not posing threats against Iran," said Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the IRGC's space force. "Sometimes they make up to three communications in one night with Iran, and all these exchanges of messages are characterized by language that conveys desires, requests instead of demands, and threats... We are now in full military force... The U.S. is not threatening Iran."
There is only one way to deter Iran and its proxies against Israel, and that is to pose a credible threat against Iran itself, especially its nuclear facilities. Since Biden is captive to Obama's destructive-sabotage policy, it seems that Israel's escalation and threats against Hezbollah are intended, among other things, to pressure the United States, since the United States is appeased toward Iran on the one hand, and complements its anti-deterrence with its vocal demands that Israel prevent at all costs the expansion of the Gaza campaign into a regional war. In other words, do not directly harm Iran, do not destroy Hezbollah, God forbid.
It takes weeks and months for Israel to deal with the thorough root cause in Gaza. One of the main ways to achieve this is not only by legitimizing the war with sometimes humiliating methods, but mainly by pressure in the north: the threat of expanding the war into a regional war could frighten the Biden and Blinken duo so much that they would allow Israel all the time needed to destroy Hamas-ISIS in Gaza. The Americans, of course, are using their forces in Israeli society against the government in order to sabotage the war effort. This clear message was conveyed by Thomas Friedman, the most despicable journalist in the Jewish world since Ilya Ehrenburg, who gave the jumping-off shot to the Soviet Union's severe anti-Semitic anti-Zionist turn against Israel in September 1948.
Venom exporters
Anti-Semitism becomes a strategic weapon, with a superpower turning hatred of Jews into one of the foundations of the regime. It happened in Germany, in the Soviet Union, and today it's Iran – with Palestinian help
Already 50 years ago, a book was published called "Anti-Semitism - A Political Weapon" by Paul Landoy (published by Am Oved). 70 years ago, a book entitled "The New Anti-Semitism" was published for the first time by Commentary magazine.
Anti-Semitism always exists, just as uranium deposits always exist, but the raw material must be mined and enriched. First the Germans understood this, and then the communists in the USSR. This is more than a political weapon, more accurate - a strategic weapon. Attacks on Israel as a Jewish stronghold will instill a wave of anti-Semitism in societies that are targeted, causing divisions, divisions and weakening of society, as is happening within the Democratic Party and in the United States as a whole.
Pro-Hamas demonstration in Washington, D.C., photo: AP
In order to turn anti-Semitism into a strategically meaningful tool, a superpower is needed that is willing to make anti-Semitism part of its ideology and one of the foundations of the regime. It happened in Germany, in the Soviet Union, and nowadays it is Iran When Russia returns to this path, China is betting on the anti-Semitic card as part of its return to the days of communist dominance. And no less so are the PLO/PA and Hamas.
In general, even if a Palestinian state does not exist, the Palestinians are a kind of international power of diplomacy, terrorism, propaganda and soft power through the media and cultural and academic strongholds. Prominent in importing this poison into democratic societies are people like Susan Sarandon and Roger Waters.
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