The sickly sweet odor of death hung heavy in Kissufim as my battalion entered the kibbutz. We were greeted by the bloated body of a Hamas terrorist, dressed in a black combat vest and dark clothing. Milky white eyes popped from his engorged face like a fish on display at the shuk. Nearby lay a tattered IDF uniform, a sticky stain, and a tourniquet.
Our infantry unit was the first full brigade of reservists called up in response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis. My phone had rung just after the first rocket warning sirens echoed throughout Jerusalem. It was Shabbat and the holiday of Simchat Torah, but the sickening feeling that something was terribly wrong twisted my stomach. I broke the Sabbath and answered the sergeant of my reserve platoon.
“Starr, pack a bag and come to the meeting site,” he said.
I stepped out of my apartment into a changed country. Jerusalem on Shabbat is usually calm, but on this day it crackled with tension. Some families on their way back from synagogue stared curiously at me as I marched in uniform down the city street to meet with other members of my company. Other reservists trickled out of their apartments, exchanging solemn nods.
“Do you need a lift anywhere?” one officer asked me.
I hopped into the car with my reservist friends, and we asked the same question to soldiers waiting on the side of the road at the exit from the capital. The exchange of glances, the queries about hitchhiking, all spoke to a shared feeling: This was an emergency unlike any we had faced, and we needed to act. We had no idea what we would face, but until we did we needed to help each other to prepare. There wasn’t time to question the situation. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the accounts of the early hours of the Yom Kippur War when soldiers and reservists dropped everything at a moment’s notice and cobbled together informal public transportation and rides to the front lines.
We arrived at the meeting site for our brigade, a base full of warehouses of equipment. We pulled in to see a sea of cars parked in a typically chaotic fashion. Even the massive parking lots of American mega-malls were rivaled by the assembly of vehicles. From the rows upon rows of cars, the trickle of reservists had become a mighty current. We joined them and filed into the warehouses, which were marked for each battalion, each company. We lined up, registered in, and signed out kit bags of equipment which were marked by specialization.
What the mission was, we had no idea. No officer within sight had a clue either. The general sense, as more information and rumors about the attacks on the Gaza border towns proliferated, was that we could be sent from the warehouses straight into combat. We could soon be in the besieged Israeli towns, which had yet to be fully secured, or we could be sent straight into the Gaza Strip itself.
We quickly unloaded the bags, prepared our gear, and tried to filter out what we would and wouldn’t need. When the armaments and ammunition arrived, we unloaded the cabinets and crates and assigned them. As we slid cartridges into magazines, we shared details of Hamas atrocities that had been reported in the news or videos we had seen on social media. Our vests were soon loaded with full magazines, and our hearts laden with grief and fury.
The frantic pace of preparations came to a pregnant halt. We waited for the next step as darkness fell, falling asleep in our boots and gear. Our expectation was to be awoken and sent into the fray.
WE AWOKE to exercises, inducting members new to our units into the order of movement for each platoon and squad. Then the word came, as sudden as the first phone call, that we were heading out. We loaded onto the bus, each of us like so many bullets in a magazine, expecting to be chambered and released at any second.
We arrived at another base in the South, where were quickly zeroed our sights and scopes. Night fell again. Instead of stars we saw only flares released by aircraft and the interception of rockets launched from Gaza. Another night in boots, another night of waiting. If we had known what we were doing, what came next, perhaps it would have been more bearable, but the unknown was more daunting than any enemy. No one wanted to go into combat, no one wanted to go into Gaza – but if we had to, we would. If the army had to go in, perhaps it would be best that it was us, many of us said.
The next day, more exercises, more waiting, more expectations that any second we could be loaded onto another bus with yet another unset destination. Finally, the buses came, and by nightfall we were in a field near the Gaza border.
The sense was that we were supposed to be headed to an attacked town, but we had stopped in the field while orders were being recalibrated. Rocket launches from the Strip were a shockingly loud rumble, like an avalanche rising into the air. Red alerts sent us leaping to the ground since we were right under the interception zones, where shrapnel could fall. At one point, my rifle, a marksman-type Micro-Tavor, fell over and the Picatinny mount bridge broke. It was a light fall, and I had never seen a rifle break in such a way in over a decade. Nothing felt safe, nothing felt in control, and the impossible break seemed to make perfect sense.
“Great, now I’m going into Gaza with a broken gun,” I grumbled to any officer who would listen.
We waited forever for our orders, patrolling the perimeter of the field, keeping watch for further terrorist infiltrators. Rumor was that higher-ranking officers were going in and out of briefings to decide deployments, as their own superiors were in deliberation on final strategies. Then, finally, we were transported to Kibbutz Urim, where we slept in our vests and bags under the awning of the kibbutz dining hall.
Entering Kissufim and witnessing the carnage
IN THE morning, we were sent to Kissufim, one of the towns that had been attacked. We filed into the dining hall, which became our temporary headquarters. Another terrorist’s corpse lay on the lawn less than 50 meters away. They couldn’t yet be moved until the site had been secured and sappers could be brought in – some of the bodies had been booby-trapped. The terrorist, and his companion who also lay dead in the bushes, had attacked in an ambush a day or so prior. They leaped from the bushes where they had been hiding, wounding IDF commandos. The kibbutz had been searched multiple times, but they had remained hidden, and the suspicion was that there were more Hamas operatives waiting to strike, surviving on dates and cherry tomatoes, just like the now rotting terrorists.
We set out into the kibbutz, weapons raised, every corner a potential ambush. The town was a scene straight out of a zombie horror film: a town that should have been bustling and full of life but was all but devoid of it. We weaved through burned husks that were once homes. Cars and windows were riddled with bullet holes. Between frequent patrols, we managed to sleep for only a few minutes at a time, fading in and out of consciousness before heading back out into another area of the abandoned town.
A team from Bezeq came in the night to repair a communications array. The terrorists had struck systematically, cutting off connection to the outside, and shooting electrical transformers and water mains. They reportedly knew where the head of the civilian security team had lived, but he had managed to fight them off.
Another escort mission allowed sappers to mark down unexploded ordnance and bodies at the entrance near the cowshed. Once they saw humans, the cows moaned and screeched, begging to be milked, pleading to be fed. They licked desperately at their metal fence. A few dead cows lay in fetid water that sloshed at the knees of the living cattle.
In the course of combat, a water main must have been destroyed. After the initial attack, a rancher had snuck back into the kibbutz in a bid to take care of the cows but had been murdered by a terrorist squad that had lain in ambush. At the nearby gate, motorcycles, bags of armaments, and Kalashnikov rifles were still strewn about.
Each platoon moved into a house on the edge of the kibbutz, our new outposts in the apocalyptic wasteland. We felt guilty about living there, but we told ourselves it was necessary to safeguard what was left and restore it to as close as it had once been. We even cleaned it up, sweeping up and washing the floors. We had our first showers, one by one, as the others took up defensive positions around them. One night, my friend Marco presented me with a rations can of halva. He lit a lighter in lieu of a candle, illuminating the words “happy birthday,” which he had written on the can in black marker. I had forgotten it was my birthday. I didn’t even know what day it was anymore; the days had bled together as one.
Mortars were constantly shrieking overhead. The hum of our own mortar teams returning fire became a comfort, a lullaby to which we would close our eyes for our meager night’s sleep.
THE NEXT day, contact: A sniper team reported seeing an unknown individual running on the periphery of the kibbutz. An officer from a mandatory service brigade came in on the radio: “It’s me, don’t shoot!” he assured, but his location didn’t match up. The incident was just about dismissed as a mistake, but our vigilant company commander held on to his suspicions and another platoon was sent to investigate.
“We’re under attack!” our sergeant alerted us, as explosions erupted down the block. In a flash, we were maneuvering along the houses to where the other platoon had engaged with the enemy. As we moved, an enemy drone hovered in the air, directing mortar fire against us. The sky sang with the shrieking of incoming mortar bombs, until they were intercepted just above our heads. Shrapnel rained down onto a car nearby. We didn’t know we had an anti-mortar system set up in the area until that moment. We took up positions outside the flashpoint house, covering the team still inside.
A terrorist had ambushed the platoon, which was still under the impression that the sniper team report was a false alarm. He had thrown an improvised grenade from a blind spot down a hall. One reservist was severely wounded in the leg, and two others were lightly wounded. The concussive force of a second grenade sent the platoon officer flying out of the house – unharmed besides ringing ears. As the terrorist came running out of the safe room where he had been hiding, our company commander took him down with a few quick shots. The wounded reservists were quickly evacuated in stable condition.
In a separate incident in another town, a sister company was not so lucky – one reservist was killed and four more were grievously wounded by a mortar bomb.
House-to-house searches became all the more necessary after the incident. What was in these homes was unknown. Sweeping through home after home, we checked for more terrorists. At this range, the broken sights of my rifle hardly mattered. We found homes riddled with bullets, bloody smears across closet doors, and kitchen knives abandoned in safe rooms. In one home, I recognized the picture of a man I had seen on the news. Saar Margolis had been killed in the Hamas massacre, bravely defending his community. In many of the houses, we found dogs and cats, quivering with fear and hiding under furniture. Some of the dogs, though shaking and crying from the traumatic attack, were just happy to see people after days of isolation.
We fed and cared for any pets as best we could, until they could be reunited with their families. Finally, a replacement rifle came for me. Electricity, water, and communications had been mostly restored. Slowly, we were securing the kibbutz.
Another reservist battalion soon replaced us in Kissufim, and we moved to another town, not far from where the Supernova music festival slaughter had unfolded. One platoon member discovered on the night we moved towns that a friend had died at the party.
Rest became more frequent, and we had more time to hone our gear. Some of us stood guard as kibbutz members held funerals for their murdered loved ones. The intensity of Kissufim faded, mortar and rocket attacks became less frequent, and we felt like we were again waiting for the next mission. We went out on patrols, searched for more victims, and staked out vulnerable sites, but it seemed that we were feeling out in the darkness, our objectives unclear. The company expressed its frustration to our commanders.
“War is a state of uncertainty,” said one of the deputy company commanders. Chaos was normal, and it was part of the battle that we had to appreciate. As soldiers, we had to conquer territory from chaos, and establish whatever positions we could in these bulwarks of sanity. The battlefield for order was not just in the kibbutzim, more than just in our hearts – the entire state was on the front lines.
We often take the sanctuary of homes for granted, but we reservists had seen how they had crumbled. We hold the conviction that our towns are constant fixtures of our environments, but concrete and brick can be leveled as easily as paper torn. The whole state felt as though it were on unstable ground.
With grim resolve, no matter how great or small the mission, bit by bit, stone by stone, we had to work to shore up the country’s broken fences and its breached sense of security.
I haven’t yet been back to Kissufim, but I hope that the stench of death has faded away.