Last weekend, my IDF Palmar medical evacuation team and I were treating and extracting two soldiers from Lebanon. One, Capt. Maoz Yisrael Recanati (24), did not make it, killed a month before his wedding; the other did, but will need a lot of surgeries.
Yet I read that the “ceasefire will be extended for another 45 days.” Try to explain that to the family and fiancée of Maoz.
There is no ceasefire in Lebanon.
I feel like I am in an Orwellian novel. US President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the mainstream media are hawking the ceasefire. Yet, the reality could not be more different. Nineteen-year-old young men are fighting and dying in this very hot and unfinished war against the terrorist Hezbollah entity, which is hell-bent on completing the slaughter of the seventh of October.
It is not only IDF soldiers being targeted, but also Israeli civilians who are still here in the sparsely inhabited North, where entire cities and kibbutzim are ghostlike in stillness. Whatever our government and the American administration are trying to sell the world, the reality is that the North of Israel has been left to its own fate for almost two-and-a-half years, and that we are in a war of attrition with one of the Iranian regime’s terrorist proxy forces.
I never dreamed – when I forced my way back into the IDF, despite being very much aged out, as a combat medic in October 2023 – that I would still be serving more than two-and-a-half years later in May 2026!
I spent a lot of time in Lebanon decades ago during my regular service, when I served as a lone soldier in the Givati Brigade, during the time the IDF maintained a security zone in south Lebanon. Our mission statement always then ended with the same sentence: “Our mission is to defend the northern communities.”
It is amazing how nothing seems to have changed in over two decades!
Hezbollah is the obstacle to peace between Israel, Lebanon
The only way for a real and genuine peace to exist between Lebanon and Israel is to topple the regime that is funding and supporting the terrorist Hezbollah. As long as they exist, no matter whether you declare a “ceasefire “or not, there will never be true peace. One cannot appease evil. It must be destroyed, for good to triumph.
Israel is fighting three wars concurrently, against Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. All these wars are currently in a state of pseudo ceasefire. We must be allowed to win these wars. Because without a conclusive and unconditional victory, we will remain in this constant state of tension and will not be able to function psychologically or financially. The entire multibillion-dollar tourism industry has been paralyzed for almost three years.
So, why do the reservists, like me, keep on returning to fight this long war?
We recognize that this is the right thing to do. We acknowledge that these are the values we were raised on. We feel it is an honor to serve our people and our country. We cannot say, “Let someone else do it.” Nothing would get done. We realize that there is an existential threat over our very existence. We understand that this is yet another “we do not have a choice” war. We know that there are tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox draft evaders.
We are fighting for our family. We are fighting for our hearth and home. We are fighting for our people. We are fighting for our country. We are fighting for our beliefs and values. We are fighting for Western civilization. We are fighting for the forces of light and right.
We need to be able to conclusively defeat our foes and not have endless “ceasefires” that are not even worth the paper they are written on. Like Nazi Germany, the Iranian terror regime and its proxies must be defeated for the sake of the future of the world.
The writer is a combat medic, currently in his 10th reserve deployment since October 2023. He has served for hundreds for days in the Palmar medical extraction unit. Recently he published a memoir on his experiences, Heroes of PALMAR, How One IDF unit Revolutionized Combat Medicine in Gaza (Gefen: 2026). The book is available on Amazon.com or Gefen.com.