YOM HA’ATZMAUT 2025-5785
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is an enigma.
On one hand, the IDF is a powerful, no-holds-barred, get-the-job-done military machine. At the same time, the IDF is human, striving to be compassionate whenever it is safe to do.
This dichotomy poses a challenge to the IDF’s mission, often difficult to navigate.
Gadi Ezra, an Israeli lawyer and diplomatic advisor, experienced this first-hand when he served in the IDF Special Forces in Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza in 2008, three years after Israel evacuated Gaza and handed it over to the Palestinians.
Ezra was the keynote speaker in front of 900 people at the April 9 Jewish National Fund-USA Mountain States Breakfast for Israel.
Eighteen years after Operation Cast Lead, Ezra views war from a dual perspective — as a lawyer and as a reservist in the Paratrooper Special Forces.
“We as a human society have a very interesting way to regulate this terrible phenomenon called war. We call it the laws of war, the laws of armed conflict,” Ezra said.
“The laws of war are basically a bunch of rules anchored in different treaties, and they define the do’s and don’t’s within war. They do not explain to the commander how to tactically or strategically operate within the war, how to maneuver with the F-35 or a battalion of tanks, but they define the general moral guidelines of how one should behave within this terrible phenomenon.”
As both a lawyer and a military man, Ezra understands the words and intent of those international laws of war but he also knows what really happens in combat.
“A strict adherence to the laws of war might put you on the right side of the law. You’re not going to be indicted, but it might lead you to partake in some really, really hard scenes. In other to avoid these scenes, yet to fulfill your mission, you’ll occasionally have to apply higher standards than the legal ones.
To illustrate his point, Ezra goes back to December 27, 2008.
It was Saturday night, and Ezra, age 22, had just finishing a great weekend at his parents’ house in the southern Israel town city of Kiryat Gat. He was driving back to law school in Tel Aviv when he received a phone call with a recording telling him to urgently report to his reserve unit in the IDF the following morning.
“I didn’t really know what was happening. No one believed that three years after the disengagement from Gaza, we would find ourselves back in Gaza with boots on the ground.
“I was terrified. If anyone tells you they’re not afraid before going to Gaza or Lebanon or Iraq or Afghanistan, they’re either liars or crazy.”
Ezra and his fellow soldiers walked into the Gaza Strip from about 1.2 miles in Israeli territory, accompanied by “a wall of fire being shot from vessels, helicopters, artillery — everything to ensure that we would arrive at our destination in the safest way possible.”
Once the soldiers arrived in Gaza, they were told to camouflage themselves, become invisible and always watch for terrorists who would be waiting for them in the first line of houses.
“Once you spot a terrorist, you’re going to be allocated with a drone above your head or an Apache [helicopter] needed to help the terrorist reunite with G-d.
“We needed to ensure that the surface was safe for the rest of the Israeli defense forces who would enter that territory 24 to 48 hours later,” Ezra recalled.
When they arrived, Ezra and his unit realized they were in a former Jewish village that had been evacuated under the disengagement plan of 2005.
“No matter if you supported the plan or objected to it, this was a really hard thing to see. I remember vividly the old basketball court of the village still standing there, waiting for the kids to come back and play. Some of my friends found mezuzzahs in the sand.
“We were the first Israelis to go back there, but we didn’t have time for nostalgia because there were two things we did not know: whether the terrorists who were only 200 yards away from us had the ability to see us at night, and whether they had sniping ability. So we were in a race to camouflage ourselves the fastest way possible before the sun came up.”
On Day 2 of Ezra’s unit in Gaza, they spotted a Hamas terrorist.
“He’s holding an AK-47 and he has binoculars, standing on the third floor of the building right in front of us, and we are prepared for engagement.”
Pivoting from military mode to lawyer mode, Ezra told the JNF crowd, “If we had the Geneva Convention right there with us, they would have told us we were doing the exact right thing because there’s a core principle in international law called the principle of necessity, which basically says that weakening the other party to armed conflict is the only legitimate cause.
“As an IDF soldier, targeting a Hamas terrorist is weakening the other party and therefore a legitimate cause, right?
“But life tends to be a bit more complicated because right next to the terrorist we spot a woman.
“We’re looking at them for over an hour and we could not prove that the woman is a terrorist, so there we were, facing a true scenario of a human shield.”
Another law of war is the principle of distinction. It says that civilians are immune from any attack unless they are directly participating in the hostilities themselves.
“This woman was not directly participating in anything. She was probably there against her will. I do not have a sniper on my team. I do have an Apache above my head. This means that a missile can take them both down.
“Does this mean that the terrorist shall enjoy the legal immunity granted to the woman? Of course not, because of the principle of proportionality.”
The principle of proportionality says that a military action is forbidden if the collateral damage it causes is excessive to the military advantage.
“The laws of war expect me — a 22-year-old kid, hungry and tired and missing my girlfriend — to evaluate how many points I will lose from targeting that woman, and if the number I’m receiving is positive, I did thing right thing and I’m a hero, and if not, I might cause a war crime,” Ezra said.
By the way, that woman was holding a baby in her arms.
“Collateral damage is a term we lawyers invented to maneuver through difficult situations. This woman is not collateral damage. She is a human being. She has a face; she has a name, she has hopes, aspirations, friends, family — one of them is in her arms.
“So we decided to wait for a time window in which she would be allowed to go to the restroom or do whatever she was allowed to do.
“Some of us still remember the missile going through the window and the woman running away from the building hysterically with the baby in her arms.
“Did we make our lives more complicated? Yes. Did we apply higher standards than the legal ones? Yes. Can we sleep better at night? Yes, we can.”
Ezra’s story of his time in Gaza includes more dramatic examples of the nuanced decisions IDF soldiers face when they are up against Hamas, such as having to distinguish an IDF soldier from a Hamas terrorist disguised as an IDF soldier.
After four days in that camouflage position, Ezra’s unit located themselves in an apartment, just outside Gaza. The apartment had a good view of a valley from which Hamas launched many rockets.
Outside the apartment on watch in the middle of the night, a soldier on Ezra’s team named Avidan saw a man with a gun dressed in an IDF uniform. Disguising terrorists in IDF uniforms is a common Hamas modus operandi. Ezra’s comrade had legal justification to shoot him, but the unit had heard about a lost IDF soldier, and Avidan saw the man was crying. He asked the man his name and the name of his parents, the name of his commander and where he grew up.
After 25 to 30 seconds of dialogue, Ezra’s comrade realized that he was facing an Israeli soldier rather than a disguised terrorist. He takes down his gun and reaches out to the guy and says, “Brother, you are safe with us.”
“The guy enters are apartment, crashes with tears, thanking us for not killing him,” said Ezra.
“This guy is alive today because my friend Avidan applied higher standards than the legal ones.
“The following day we celebrated Shabbat in that apartment. I’ve had a few emotional davenings in my life, but nothing compared to that.”
After that incident, Ezra’s unit was sent back into Gaza, this time to a fancy villa. Ezra points out that, in contrast to all the poverty in Gaza, there is also wealth.
In this fancy villa, the soldiers see a photo of the head of the family shaking hands with the late Yasir Arafat, arch terrorist of the PLO. On the walls, there were also diplomas in English and French.
The soldiers also noticed that the family must have been very rushed when they left the villa because their laundry was still folded on the sofa.
This is what Ezra thinks probably happened:
“Before the IDF enters a neighborhood, we don’t just knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, we’re here.’ We send leaflets. We sent text messages. We post on Twitter and Facebook. We take over the TV and radio stations.
“We’re doing everything in our power to let them know that the most powerful military in the Middle East is about to enter your neighborhood.”
The IDF soldiers entered the villa and just crashed on the sofa. They were tired; their backs were hurting. However, after 10 minutes, Ezra’s commander said, ‘Guys, change in plans. We have to evacuate this place immediately.’”
Those leaflets, texts and posts telling residents the IDF is coming are also seen by the terrorists.
The commander told his men they needed to put the villa back in the exact condition they found it in, because when they collapsed on the sofa, they had pushed that folded laundry onto the floor.
“So I find myself, at the age of 22, in the middle of Gaza folding laundry!” Ezra said. “And I took a piece of paper from my notebook that I always carried with me, and wrote to the family, ‘Sorry for the mess. May peace come upon us.’”
Ezra said he finishes with that laundry-folding story “because to me it stresses the simple notion that we as soldier are not just engaging with collateral damages, we’re engaging with human beings, and we’re taking that job very, very seriously.
“There is a direct link between the way a nation conducts its warfare and the way it conducts its society. If we were to be barbarians on the battlefield — just because we can — these norms would be integrated into our civilian lives and harm all the checks and balances in our fragile society.
“If you ask me, that — not Iran, not Hezbollah, not Hamas — is the true danger to the Zionist project we are all part of, Jews and Jewish allies alike.”