Two weeks ago, Lt. Col. Ohad, deputy commander of the Golan Brigade, rushed toward a house in Shijaiyah where contact with four IDF soldiers had been lost, fearing they might have been abducted. En route, he encountered terrorists in narrow alleys. After a two-and-a-half-hour battle, he learned that 13th Golani Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Tomer Greenberg and Col. Itzhak Ben Basat were among the fatalities.
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In front of him was Dan, a 53-year-old reserve soldier in the brigade, who stormed into battle like any other soldier there, to rescue the supposedly abducted soldiers who ultimately were found dead.
At that moment, Ohad once again realized the essence of the Golani Brigade’s spirit, whose personnel are comprised of 30% reservists performing missions with extraordinary risks typical of special forces units.
The real threat: a divided Israel
Lt. Cols. Ohad and Dan haven't been home in over 75 days. This means complete isolation from their families but also from the impacted home front, where unity has recently started to waver again. These were long weeks inside Gaza, often without access to a phone, unaware of what was happening in Israel, and without updates on social media or television.
Only last week, nearly three months into the war in Gaza, Lt. Col. Ohad returned home for the first time.
After losing more than 70 officers and soldiers on October 7, the Golani Brigade was confident they would return to a united Israel. However, the brigade commanders’ spirit waned not only because of the intense pain of losing so many friends during the fighting and the visits to mourning families but also because of the ongoing controversy at home.
Once again, a rift was forming, and election campaigns running in the midst of a war, while soldiers were still being buried every day. Some IDF commanders feared this scenario more than clashes with Hamas, so they initially refused to send their 19-year-old soldiers back home, fearing they would resume arguing among themselves instead of focusing on the mission.
"Every time I went home this weekend and saw an article about a dispute or argument, it really brought me down, it makes it difficult for us," Lt. Col. Ohad told Ynet. "We’re most afraid of what will happen in Israel the day after the war. Will we once again start pitting one side against the other, without realizing that we share a common goal?”
“Will we look for scapegoats and say supporters or opposers to the judicial reform made us weak? The worst thing that can happen to us is to return to the Israeli society we had before October 7. If that happens, we are lost. Simple as that. The soldiers at the front, in every brigade, are now fighting in Gaza for everyone in the country," he added.
Today, the Golan Brigade is operating in a new area, the central camps between Gaza City and Khan Younis, facing Hamas units that they need to eliminate. After the devastating blow the brigade suffered on October 7, Lt. Col. Ohad hurried to visit one of the platoons from which seven soldiers fell, in a small military outpost near the Gaza border.
"It was on the second day following the attack when terrorists were still in the area. I found young lion-hearted soldiers who gave me strength and showed tremendous mental fortitude. I returned to their commander, Col. Yair Paley, and told him I didn’t know what we did to deserve them. I gathered a lot of strength from them."
The Golani Bridge translated this strength in Gaza. After raiding dozens of terror dens in neighborhoods including al Rimal and Zeitoun, the unit was ordered to clear out Hamas’ fortified neighborhood of Shijaiyah.
"We found terrorists or military equipment in every central Shijaiyah home we entered," Lt. Col. Ohad recounted. "We were there for two weeks, and eliminated close to 700 terrorists. We found many terrorists who came from nearby places like the Daraj Tuffah neighborhood.”
“They prepared a lot of traps rigged with explosives for us there, and due to the density of the alleyways, there was no need for tunnels at all to hide,” he added. “They shot at us without revealing themselves.”
"We had an incident where a terrorist fired at us from a very narrow place where armored vehicles and tanks couldn't enter. It was face-to-face combat set between ancient houses from the Middle Ages with very thick walls, just like in the old cities of Jaffa and Akko," he added.
The presence of enemy combatants concealed within houses was so substantial that soldiers were compelled to demolish some of the structures using explosives and military bulldozers. "The most memorable moment for me was when we reached the neighborhood’s central square and toppled Hamas’ statue featuring Oren Shaul’s dog tag, who was my driver in Operation Protective Edge," Lt. Col. Ohad said, referring to an IDF soldier who was killed in an ambush in Gaza in 2014 and whose body has been held by Hamas since.
"Golani beat Hamas’ Shijaiyah Battalion. A resident of Kibbutz Nahal Oz or Kfar Aza who returns home and opens the window will no longer see standing houses in Shijaiyah.”