7/17/2006 Nahal Haredi soldiers in Lebanon
Source: Bamahaneh (IDF News Source - translated)
Bamahaneh, 17 July 2006
The Bamahaneh team spent days with the fighting troops on the northern front – Armored Battalion 82, the Druze Harb Battalion, Nahal Battalion 50, and the Nahal Haredi Battalion – and accompanied their fighters, under constant bombardment, in the operation to retrieve the bodies of their comrades, and in preparation for days of conflict.
Yarden Ben-Zur
In May, tensions on the northern border increased. Concern about the possibility of a soldier being kidnapped concentrated on the sector controlled by the Baram division, the western sector of the Lebanese border, which was generally quiet. 7 Division’s Armored Battalion 82 was spread across the whole area. We rode with the commander of Company A, Captain Tzuri, and the battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Oded, as they made their way between the various tank crews scattered across the area.
One of the tanks was manned by Squad 3 from Company A. “Everyone here covers the other guy’s backside,” the tank commander, Sgt. Gadi Mosayev, told Bamahaneh. “It’s hard to be a whole week in a tank, even for me, the commander, with my head outside. We’ve been living in the tank for ten days. Our last operations on the line were in Gaza, the operations there were much shorter.”
Mosayev and his team didn’t make a fuss about their situation. They slept sitting up in the tank, with little food and no way of taking a shower. They were a silent backup, mostly with nothing to do, waiting for the explosion that didn’t happen. It seemed that they were a little frustrated with the watchful expectation that promised, but didn’t deliver. This week, after the kidnapping of the two reservists, Sgt. Mosayev went out in his tank, without his normal crew, into Lebanese territory. The tank went over a mine, and all four of them lost their lives. Mosayev, the exhausted, yet unassuming, tank commander, became, against his will, one of the tragic heroes of the early fighting on the northern border last week.
On the day after the incident in which Mosayev met his death, we met soldiers of the Maslul company from the Nahal’s Battalion 50. They were not far from Shetula, lying on the grass. The echoes of mortar shells shook the skies. The soldiers were waiting. Some were lying in the sun, others were reading. A glance at the cover of one of the books told us that it was Ron Leshem’s “If There’s a Paradise,” which describes the bloody fighting in Lebanon. A soldier in another of the battalion’s companies, Sgt. Nimrod Cohen, was killed the day before by a direct hit from a mortar. The soldier who was reading looked up at the sound of another explosion. It seemed as though the Lebanese fire had broken out from the pages of the book onto the pages of reality.
There’s an insufferable gap between the newspapers lying around, with headlines shouting “War!” and the daily realities faced by the soldiers in this unit. But it’s clear to everyone, just as it was clear to the late Staff -Sgt. Mosayev, that things could change in a moment.
To retrieve the bodies
The soldiers of the Nahal Haredi were moved on Wednesday from their permanent location in the Jordan Valley. The battalion, which was on leave when the recent events began, was sent directly to the border.
On Wednesday evening, the soldiers were ready at Nahariya Junction, waiting to get to the hills on the “blue line” (the international border).
The entrance to Moshav Shetula was full of soldiers, organizing themselves to sleep under the trees. The next day, soldiers from the battalion would be taking part in the painful task of searching for body parts from the four tank crew members who had been killed that morning. At the assembly point, at dawn, the first body lay like a knight. It had been found whole. “Not even a scorch mark on his boots,” said Major Shai, commander of the Rifles Company. “It’s very strange, although I do remember a case in Netzarim, in which an armored vehicle was blown up by a bomb. The gunner was thrown from the cabin, landing some meters away, and so his body was found in one piece.”
“That’s ours”, Lieut.-Col. Yaron, the battalion commander, says calmly, as explosions are heard in the skies along the border. Later he explains that, “when you hear a long whistle followed by an explosion, then it’s a Hizbullah shell. If you hear the explosion and then the whistle, it’s one of ours on the way out.”
For Major Shai, the search for body parts recalls the picture that is engraved in his memory, of Givati soldiers crawling on their knees, searching for the body parts from their comrades who had been killed when their APC was blown up on the Philadelphi Route. The search then was accompanied by intense debate over the ethics of endangering the lives of the searchers to retrieve the bodies of the dead. This time, the soldiers in the field have no doubts. “It takes me back to Gaza. There we paid a price, a soldier was killed. Yes, it’s hard to explain to parents. It’s hard to understand a mission like that, but I have no doubt that it’s worth it,” says Major Shai.
The search begins 200 meters from where the tank was hit, inside Israeli territory. The plan is to advance in a line, to examine the whole area, and to cross the fence into Lebanese territory. A salvo of mortar shells that passes only a few meters over the heads of the soldiers upsets the plan. The soldiers stop. They turn back, frustrated. All that they had found was some pieces of metal, all that was left of the tank, which had been vaporized. Major Shai adds angrily, as they turn back, “We can’t search for the bodies of our comrades. The Hizbullah knew that we would come back, that we don’t leave bodies on the battlefield.”
The commander of Battalion 82, Lieut.-Col. Oded, bids a warm farewell to Lieut.-Col. Yaron, while holding the sealed collection bags. Yaron nods and smiles, as if to say that he knows that these bits of metal, notwithstanding their importance for investigating the incident, are of little comfort to Oded, or to anyone.
An hour later, the battalion will be making its way back to Judea and Samaria, to provide reinforcements in the Jenin sector. In the bus, heading south, one of the soldiers will say, sadly, “I didn’t join a combat unit for this. I don’t understand why where not staying here, in the middle of what’s going on.” Suddenly, the fighting in the Occupied Territories became only a sideshow to what was happening in the north.
