D9 operators: The humble heroes of Israel's urban warfare, Part 2

Editorial note: On 22 January 2025, Murtadd to Human published Herzi Halevi, the top brass and the "Palestinian state" agenda, Part 1 and Herzi Halevi, the top brass and the "Palestinian state" agenda, Part 2, in which we examined the military leadership's deliberate and systematic degradation of the IDF as a fighting force and their headlong rush to dismantle the ground forces in particular. A fitting compliment to this essay has now emerged, in the form of the Doron Keidar Podcast interview with an IDF D9 combat bulldozer operator, Efraim Abrams, a soldier at the receiving end of the top brass's wrecking frenzy, and the first to enter Gaza in the current war. There have been many "straight from the horse's mouth" accounts of the war in Gaza, but none as moving, humbling and eye-opening as Abrams's, told from the perspective, both literally and figuratively, of a D9 operator. We owe a debt of gratitude to Doron Keidar for bringing Abrams to us and for so sensitively allowing him to open up. We bring to our readers excerpts from that interview, in three parts, and encourage you to gain a fuller picture by also reading the Herzi Halevi essay linked above. Efraim Abrams is a truly remarkable man, to whom we express our heartfelt gratitude, wishes for his speedy recovery and return to that which he loves most, fighting Israel's enemies with a bulldozer.

I'm religious. On Shabbat you're not allowed to use any electronics. So if I get a phone call from the military, I have to answer just in case it's something. My officer calls me and he would never call me on Shabbat. I answer the phone and he tells me that a couple of terrorists, a couple of terrorists, infiltrated the border and they're firing rockets. Now I've taken a border patrol before, up in Lebanon, up in Judea and Samaria, never in Gaza though. But they said a few terrorists infiltrated. The IDF is there. They have the battalions. They probably have it under control. I'll be on standby just in case.

I get up, brush my teeth and get ready to go to synagogue. I live by the central bus station in Jerusalem. That's literally the most central part of Israel. At 8:10 an air raid [siren] went off and right there I understood. If my officer called me and there's an air raid [siren] in the central bus station right now, on a holiday, something really serious just went down. So I go to my porch and I see rockets firing over my head. I run to my roommate. I tell him to wake up. We got to get to the bomb shelter and he goes back to sleep because he didn't think anything of it. A few hours passed by—a few hours—an hour—for a couple of minutes, really, I started to understand that SHTF, something really, really bad just happened and we were all being called back to base.

Now if combat engineering is called up to base, you understand something really really bad happened, especially if the D9 guys are being called back. [Prior to October 7th] we were stationed in the Golan Heights. We were in training. We were two months into training already and we'd had to go up north on October 7th to gather all of our equipment, our APCs, our D9s, our explosives, our weapons, all of our logistics. So on October 7th, I got a phone call from my logistics officer that had to command over a bus for the Jerusalem district. We gathered all the people and sped up north.

Within 48 hours we found ourselves with all of our armoured vehicles, with all of our equipment on the border of Gaza, waiting to invade. Now, it took twenty days before we entered Gaza, because we had to make sure that there weren't any more terrorists in Israel. We have to gain an understanding of who's missing, who's alive, who's not alive, who's a hostage, who's where and that took time. Really, Hamas did a really good move on us and for those few weeks we really were in a bad state and after twenty days, we finally invaded Gaza.

People ask if I was shocked that October 7th happened and I tell them the truth: it didn't shock me at all. I was already two years and two months into my service and in combat, I took guard duty on almost every border and I saw how unprofessional everything was. Everyone was saying, "Oh how is it that our soldiers don't have the proper equipment?" I and American soldiers who come to Israel to join the IDF, we love the tactical firearms world and we come with our own equipment. I'd come with a proper plate carrier and proper equipment and my upper chain of command would tell me, "You can't wear that. It's not allowed. You have to wear what we give you." And I tell them this is the cream of the crop of equipment.

There was such a closed-minded mindset amongst the chain of command that I understood how vulnerable we are. I also understood that manpower did not exist amongst the combat battalions that took guard duty on our most important borders. I wasn't shocked when we heard [the] Golani [Brigade] was completely outnumbered, that they were completely ambushed and their military outposts were completely taken over. It wasn't a shock to me, because when I was on the Lebanon border in the summer of 2022, we had the same exact thing and I would tell my officers, listen we don't have manpower here. You know we're taking two guys on a patrol in an unarmored vehicle on the Lebanon border and we see Radwan terrorists, commandos, every day.

The Rules of Engagement put every soldier in handcuffs that we weren't allowed to do anything. So it was just a matter of time. We weren't allowed to fight; it's almost as if we had to give hugs and kisses to our enemy who's only dreaming of the day they can shed our blood. I came from abroad to join and to fight the enemy and for those two years and two months it didn't happen. My whole service up until the war I tell people I was in two different armies. I was in the army of October 7th and the army after October 7th. The army before October 7th was unprofessional. it was run, and still is, by corrupt individuals who are so close-minded that when their small itty-bitty soldier who doesn't have a rank comes and says something extremely logical and very important, they looked away. Then October 7th happened and we were an army on the brink of death.

We were very lucky, because we had the police on that day. They pretty much, along with Israeli civilians, saved the day. They really held the line for sure, and then after October 7th, all these generals understood, okay, we need real equipment, we need NIJ [(US) National Institute of Justice] certified ballistic armour, we need proper firearms. In my entire time in Gaza, I had two M4s, none of them ever worked. I knew that I had two grenades and a knife. That's what I was fighting with, because our equipment was outdated. Everything was so corrupted and Hamas, our enemies, are very smart. Never underestimate the powers of your enemies. Hamas was so smart, they planned everything. They knew that our leadership within the army and outside the army was so corrupted and so rotten that they would use it for their advantage and that's exactly what happened on October 7th.

People don't know that there was supposed to be an entire extra battalion guarding the Gaza border on October 7th, and they had taken them out and had sent them to Judea and Samaria. The Gazans knew about this. They saw it was the perfect time to attack and we were very lucky that they didn't coordinate with Hezbollah, their brothers up north. We probably would have lost the entire country, and as someone who's been to these borders all around, we probably would have seen an actual Holocaust on October 7th, 2023, if Hezbollah had joined and taken part in that invasion.

About two weeks before the invasion we were debriefed (sic) what our mission was going to be. We knew that we were going to be dispatched to different battalions, different teams, different companies. People don't understand this, but the D9 world is very, very small. It's not like there's tens, hundreds of thousands of infantrymen. [There are only a] only very small amount of D9 operators, whether commanders or an actual D9 operator himself. That does leave us with very few tools for a lot of people. We knew that because we were on our mandatory service, that we are going to be the most operational. The reserves come and go, but the mandatory service don't leave. We stay until we're done with our mandatory service.

I was under the 162nd division that's been fighting in the Gaza theatre, and under that I was under the 401st brigade fighting in Gaza. That's a tank brigade. Under that brigade I was in the 601st combat engineering battalion, which is the most operational combat engineering battalion in this entire war. This battalion probably destroyed the majority of the infrastructure in Gaza, whether it's northern Gaza, central Gaza or southern Gaza. We also knew this, because our entire division is under the Southern Command, which means that Gaza is going to be our playground, us as pretty much the only D9 company in the entire division. We're the only company that is truly there. So we knew that we were going to have the most important missions.

In my company, my team was the best D9 team, because we were the most weathered and well-seasoned operatives in the company. We knew that also meant we're probably getting the heaviest mission. We were dispatched to the 52nd battalion under their 7th company, which is a reservist company. I know these numbers are a little confusing, but the 52nd battalion till this day has the most confirmed terrorists killed in Gaza, is the first battalion to cross the border. The commander of the brigade asked the battalion commander to find a company commander in the reserves to [assemble] an all-star tank company, to take the best tank operators and the best team and give them the most important missions, and that's exactly what he did. They got really seasoned tank operators who have been on almost every Gaza mission and every Lebanon mission in the last ten, twenty years. They needed D9 operators and the best D9s that were available and that was my team. So we come to the [briefing] of what our mission is going to be. The company commander tells us our mission is the most important mission currently in the entire IDF. We're the first to enter Gaza. We're the first to open the gates of hell. We're the first in over twenty years to enter terrain where the enemy is just waiting to kill us. So we're four D9s, which means it's four commanders and four operators. We looked at all the commanders, we looked at each other and we understood. This was a suicide mission for us.

Combat engineering is always first in. It means we're going to lead the way. We were split into two teams: the main force; and the attacking force. The main force goes first, the attacking force will be behind and they'll be cover fire for the main force. I was dispatched to the main force, which meant that I was going to be the first one to enter along with my D9 partner. We were the very first two D9s to enter Gaza, which meant we were the first people to go in.

A week before the invasion, we prepared the ground. We went into Gaza for three kilometres and had to prepare the ground for all of the 162nd division prior to invasion. My partner Dina and I, we were the first ones in and we saw a Hello Kitty bag and I get up on the radio and I asked that commander, there's a Hello Kitty bag here. Should we shoot it? Should we do something? He says "No, it's nothing." One of the tankers says, "I'm going to shoot it." He shoots it and it blows up.

On October 7th they [re-]entered Gaza and they would hide children's bags with explosives. They know that we're going to come and pick it up, because it looks innocent—

DK: Exactly, and we think it might belong to one of the kids they took.

EA: Right next to it was also one of those small mopeds and right next to that were RPGs and RPG warheads that were just thrown out of a sack. It's there right next to the border of Northwestern Gaza, between Kibbutz Zikim and a Kibbutz Netiv HaAsara, by the Eretz Crossing. Right there is where we prepare the invasion—also we weren't even sure if we were really going to invade. There was a question mark [over whether this was really] gonna happen, because every single time there was a reason to invade Gaza, the IDF never had the guts to do it.

Then came Friday October 27th, where we understood the day is coming and we're going to invade and we get into our vehicles, we make our phone calls to our families. I called up my parents and I told them, "Guys, they're taking our phones away. I'm not going to be able to talk. I don't know for how long." I'm not going to get too much into that, but that was not an easy phone call. My father he blesses me before I go in and my father was Tier One special forces. He knows what war is. He knows what being in an operational theatre is, and I can hear his voice, you know, cracking and crying as he's blessing me, and I'm, I'm crying on the phone, inside. I have soldiers; they can't see me cry, you know, I'm about to go invade, so I'm done. We hang up the phone and I just I swallow all the the tears, and I put on the warrior mode, I put on that the warrior face and it's money time. We're going in and I get in a vehicle and we start the invasion. Friday night October 27th, 2023, my partner and I, along with 7th Company in the 52nd Battalion, entered Gaza and opened the gates of hell.

Part 3/...

Picture credits:

Screenshot from Caspian Report

Screenshot from Jerusalem Post