An Israeli soldier reflects on his military service in Gaza: NPR

HERZLIA, Israel — Alon Keren, 21, spent two weeks in uniform inside Gaza, then had two days off last month when Israel and Hamas agreed to a brief ceasefire.

“The first thing was laundry,” he says of his quick visit home, where he was sitting in the backyard of his parents’ home in Herzliya next to a heat lamp and citrus trees. “Good bath, good food, good sleep, good friends.”

He had to return to Gaza the next morning.

Keren is one of hundreds of thousands of reservists called up to serve in the Israeli army following the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, which Israel says killed 1,200 people. His mission is to bring supplies to and from Gaza for the 20 soldiers fighting in his commando unit.

“Someone had to do it,” he says. “It's a small task, but in the end it helps.”

Keren spoke with NPR on November 25, roughly a month after Israel's ground invasion of Gaza. Today, the ground invasion has continued for two months, and Kirin is still there.

So far, the army says more than 160 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza. Recently, the forces killed three Israeli hostages by mistake. Health officials in Gaza say more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began.

Keren's first-hand experiences of the war in Gaza differ greatly from the experiences of two million Palestinians struggling to survive under bombardment – and from the experiences of soldiers fighting on the front lines.

But his account will sound familiar to those who have served in the military: the routine, the waiting, the blunders and small inconveniences, the camaraderie with his friends in the unit, and the feeling of being disconnected from the broader perspective of war.

Below are his early impressions.

His routine involves quick trips back and forth across the Gaza border

Every few days, Keren and his team return to Israel for a few hours, to a small military outpost along the border, with equipment to repair: damaged weapons and drones that either malfunctioned or were accidentally shot out of the sky by soldiers, mistaking them. them to Hamas drones.

“It's like a routine for me,” Keren says. “Almost every day we have a mission that takes about three to seven hours, and we do that. It's like driving from one place to another and moving soldiers… to move equipment from Israel to Gaza, from Israel to Gaza, from Israel to Gaza.” Gaza to Israel.

While in the barracks in Israel, they have the opportunity to shower and access their cell phones, telling their parents and friends that they are okay.

On one of those quick trips across the border, Israeli comedian Guy Hochman visited. He entertained soldiers inside Gaza and along the border, posting videos of his encounters to the delight of the soldiers' worried friends back home. “Take a break from Gaza!” The comedian says in an Instagram video, in which Kirin and his fellow soldiers are seen cheering in the background.

When soldiers are ready to return to Gaza, they deposit their phones back in the barracks and return in Humvees with supplies for other troops: food, water, hand sanitizer, wipes, beef jerky, snacks and chocolate.

Keren declines to describe the specific tasks of his commando unit, except to say that combat soldiers are sent throughout Gaza to carry out raids that range from 24 to 48 hours. Sometimes he evacuates soldiers with minor shrapnel wounds, rushes them to a heliport in Gaza to fly them to Israel or transfers them across the border to ambulances that take them to hospitals. More than 100 soldiers have been killed in Gaza, but he himself did not participate in the fighting.

Between missions, he hangs out with other soldiers and reads books.

“There is a lot of waiting time in war,” he says.

His own experience in Gaza has so far insulated him from some of the worst dangers of war

During his two-week stint in Gaza, Keren says he did not see a single Palestinian.

“Not one,” he says.

Israel ordered the Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza, where Keren's unit is stationed. Some Palestinians remained, but Keren and his fellow soldiers slept in Palestinian homes whose residents had fled.

For the first week, his unit stayed in an abandoned house, with the Palestinian owner's belongings gathered in one room and soldiers in sleeping bags on the floor in another. Keren was sleeping with earplugs because of the continuous shelling and the roar of tank engines. The windows were broken, and he slept covered in a net because of the flies that swarmed his feet in the morning.

In the second week, they seized a house near the Mediterranean Sea with a swimming pool; He is not sure if Palestinians live there because the house was new and empty of their belongings when he arrived.

One of the soldiers in his unit brought a camera to Gaza, and took a picture of Crane and four soldiers on the floor of that building, sitting on sleeping mats under some graffiti the soldiers had written on the wall: a random drawing of a panda, people's names in Hebrew.

“You make the place…as cozy as possible,” he says of the doodles on the wall.

Kirin says he doesn't feel afraid. Having his friends from the unit with him at home and developing a daily routine helps him forget the danger of being a soldier in Gaza.

“The days for me are very simple,” he says. “It's like a routine for me. We wake up, we drink coffee, and you can see the beach, and it's beautiful.”

Another photo shows a group of soldiers in the Kirin unit lounging on a Mediterranean beach at sunset, in a part of northern Gaza where the Israeli army has taken complete control.

“That area… is very safe. So you don't feel the war there. You feel the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] – This is it [its] place. So it's not like that anymore, it's not Gaza anymore.”

Other photos taken by soldiers in Gaza and the West Bank in recent weeks have sparked controversy and drawn rebuke from Israeli officials, such as photos of dozens of Palestinian suspects stripped to their underwear and blindfolded, and video A soldier sings the Hanukkah song into a mosque microphone.

War is personal for him

Gaza is no longer what it was before the war. The destruction is widespread. The deaths are catastrophic. The vast majority of Palestinians have been displaced from their homes at Israel's request to flee the fighting. They search for flour to bake bread; They sleep in stores, schools, hospitals, tents and cars.

Keren's friend, Noam Segal, 20, who was sitting with Keren in her backyard, says she is angry about the social media posts she sees from people around the world angry at the destruction and killing Israel is wreaking.

“They make us [into] “Something we don't do,” says Segal, who also served in the Army Reserve during the war and trained soldiers. “Our war is not against the people who live there. We are fighting against the terrorist organization that is trying to kill us.”

It reflects on the Palestinian civilians suffering from the war in Gaza.

“I'm sorry people [who are] Not part of [the fighting] “I live there and I need to put up with this,” she says. “But I also – I need to think first about my people.”

She and Keren know three Israelis their age who were captured by Hamas on October 7. One of them is Kirin's neighbor a few houses away. Their mothers are friends.

When Keren was in Gaza, he thought of the hundreds of Israelis detained, perhaps very close to where he was.

“It's a very strange feeling,” Keren says.

Two of Keren's friends have since been released from captivity and released from Gaza, in exchange for Israel releasing Palestinian prisoners and detainees. His neighbor down the street is still being held hostage.

Now, after his quick leave, Keren is back in uniform in Gaza.

He is a young soldier, motivated by his military mission. He admits he has no real sense of the bigger picture about where the war is headed.

“You can't understand the big picture,” he says. “For me, it's right to be there and participate. It's not fun for us. It's not fun for anyone. But we have to do it…to protect our civilians and make sure they can live in their cities.” security.”