D9 operators: The humble heroes of Israel's urban warfare, Part 3

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.

What you see today is Gaza is in crumbs. When we entered Gaza, it was a fully-built city, and I remember before we made it to the actual city, I'm looking through my binoculars and I'm just saying, "What's going to come once we make it to there?" Three, four days into the invasion, I volunteered to go to the Tabar Battalion. The Tabar Battalion is an infantry battalion under Givati, and they needed a D9, so I volunteered. The worst tragedy that I witnessed in Gaza was here. It was night and we were looking for a tunnel. We're operating with night vision. When you go to battle—I mean, like, think about it. You're with an armoured bulldozer looking for a tunnel with night vision. I mean, just, like, if you, I think, it's like the coolest thing ever, right? Like it's super badass—and we couldn't find the tunnel.

We're already a month into the war and four days into the ground invasion. We're destroyed, we're tired, we're functioning like robots. We couldn't find the tunnel and then sunrise came. At sunrise and sunset was the toughest battles, which we only discovered at the beginning. We didn't understand how Hamas fights. We didn't understand their tactics. It took a few days, a few weeks, till we fully grasped how they fought. At sunrise we heard on the radio that there was a terrorist with an RPG and he fired it at a Namer APC and the whole APC blew up, nine killed and two wounded. One of the guys who was wounded succumbed to his wounds and only one man survived. This was called the Namer tragedy, and right to the left of me I see this armoured APC—not even—it's a coffin with ten soldiers who are, may their souls rest in peace, but it was right there when it really hit me, that I'm in war. Up until then, like October 7th, you knew you're in war, but that's when it smacked me in the face, and I and and I knew people were dying and it's the fourth day to the invasion. Ten guys were just killed next to me what, what is to come of the next few days, weeks, months, however long it's going to be and and and it's something that really really stuck with me until this day, really.

There were so many conspiracy theories that came out. In rehabilitation, I actually spoke to one of the men who replaced those men and their armoured APC after the APC was rebuilt. He told me that the RPG actually penetrated and it hit one of the LAU missiles and detonated it inside the vehicle. After this they came out with a rule that we can't have any explosives inside the APCs because of this, and it was really just a freak thing. I mean, it wasn't like they have these crazy RPGs that are that are nuclear, you know.

He came out of the tunnel that we had been looking for and where was the tunnel? In a residential area! Now before we entered Gaza, we were briefed about the poverty that existed in Gaza. They didn't brief us about the rich lifestyle that existed in Gaza, and when we made it through, I went and destroyed villas, mansions, on the beaches and houses that were far nicer than houses I've been to in Israel and even in the United States, houses that were just five-star built homes and in this area, in this rich residential area where you came out of a tunnel. If you're a civilian and you live in this area, you're going to tell me that you didn't know there was a tunnel. Everybody knew.

We once made it to a very fine, five-story house. This man built it for his entire family, an incredible villa-styled home, and he was well-respected amongst Hamas. I went through his stuff in his library to see what kind of person lives in such a luxurious house. I took all the stuff. He had a Hamas Certificate of Appreciation. He had Hamas patches. He had a ticket to a Hamas gala event back in 2017.

I so badly wanted to find things that showed the truth about what really was Gaza and I found a book that showed everything, a Hamas summer camp pamphlet book from 2013, before the last Gaza war. There's pictures of these ten, eleven-year-old kids learning to shoot AK-47s in formation. They were going to extremist imam classes to learn about being a shahid in jihad. When I was going through the pages, I was so happy to see it, not happy that children are learning to become genocidal, but happy because here it is. I have the proof for the world to know that this actually did happen.

I continued going through his books and I found all his other extreme jihadist ideologies and that's really what it was. Those kids in that magazine pamphlet were my age by October 7th. They were the ones who invaded, who crossed and slaughtered, because that's what they were brought up on. I didn't get brainwashed. I didn't go to a summer camp where we were shooting in formation to kill Gazans. It doesn't exist.

When I came to Israel, [I was struck by] the unprofessionalism that exists here. When you come as someone who goes shooting at ranges in the States and who's a proud member of the 2A [Second Amendment to the United States Constitution] community, you come here and you're using weapons from the Vietnam War. I got my pistol with me right here. I only get 100 rounds. Why only 100 rounds? Why can't I have unlimited rounds? I'm here in Gush Etzion right now. There is an Arab village called Tuqu' about two kilometres away from me. They are fully armed and ready for when the day comes, with unlimited ammunition, to kill as many Jews. I get 100 rounds. Why do I get only 100 rounds? That's the mentality here. You would think after October 7th, okay, the civilians saved the day. Let's arm them. Let's give them incredible equipment. Let's get them access to better firearms, more firearms, because local militias are the ones that are protecting Israel at the front line. But we don't have a Second Amendment here. We have very strict rules and those strict rules, sadly, led to many people dying on October 7th.

DK: It's very unfortunate and we're still catching up to where we were. On October 7th, our first responders are the ones who are armed by the military to defend the communities, so essentially... a well-regulated militia, but essentially these are civilians who are volunteer responders, first responders to an invasion of any kind to these Jewish communities. Their ARs [Armelite Rifles], which the Ministry of Defense issued them, were taken from them. They were not [only] taken away, but were put into safes in the community, in a central location. The concept was that only if you come under attack, someone's going to run over there with a key, they're going to open the safe, they're going to hand out the weapons and you're also going to have to load bullets into the magazines, because the magazines were separated from the rifles and the magazines were emptied. This is what I know was the fate of many of these guys, a lot of them good friends of mine. I've developed relationships with these guys for many years, trying to help raise awareness for them, help raise funds for them to get gear.

The guy who's the head of the Eshkol [Regional] Council [bordering Gaza] came under two ambushes on October 7th, while he was trying to get to his military counterpart to discuss defensive measures for the thirty-two communities under his leadership. If he did not have that donor-funded armoured vehicle, he would have been dead today. That's the reality.

We have to run to a central location where everything is taken apart and men literally died running to go get the weapons, because guess what? The terrorists knew that.

EA: It's a sad truth in this country that the leadership in Israel doesn't learn from its mistakes. If you live as a Jew, you're a minority in the Middle East. Jews, Druze. Christian minorities here, we're outnumbered by Islamic jihadists who surround us. We need to be able to arm ourselves for when the day comes and the day came and people, we, warned our politicians, but they're so corrupt and the elitists amongst Israel handcuffed the Israeli civilian from protecting his family, her family, his community and we got hit hard. We paid a big price and that's very unfortunate.

DK: Another thing I saw as a big failure was the military leadership so pacified in taking action or initiative, because the soldiers did take action. They showed up. They were there, but then they were waiting for orders to trickle down from the High Command. We're here. We're ready. We're armed. We're prepared to go fight these terrorists, but they let us all wait till somebody gives the green light. What what we really needed on that day was somebody like Ariel Sharon, who was ordered, "Don't go and invade Egypt. Don't cross the border." Right, and then he reports "They said, Yes." And he plays dumb, like the radio isn't working, but had he not made that move in the Six-Day War, we would not have been in the advantage that we were thanks to his initiative.

That's the sad reality that is a sore spot, obviously, for you as well, as a young soldier. I have over twenty years experiencing watching the decline of the military in taking initiative, in making the decision. The commander who's in the field, who's seeing the threat and is trained to respond to that threat, but no. Let's wait for a green light, because we don't want to be labeled as that soldier who pulled the trigger.

EA: We have such a strong military, we really do, and why didn't we use it beforehand. When I was in Gaza with 551 commando reserves, we were about a kilometre away from Nir Oz, a kibbutz that lost a lot of people, and we went to Islamic Jihad, the terrorist organisation that had a military training base in Gaza right on the border. [The IDF] needed the lines to get there and open the path to make sure there weren't any explosives. So I'm opening the path and I make it to this training base, a CQB [close-quarters battle] training base. I made it to the CQB part of the base—open field; everything's outside in the open and you had shipping containers. Each container was supposed to model something else. One modelled a school. It had chairs in it and they were training to raid into a school and kill everyone or take hostages.

I continued to the shooting range and anyone who's been to a shooting range knows you have the targets at the end and behind the targets you have a wall or a bourn of sand. This was a very different one. Past the targets you had the sand and the middle was cut away to go through to the other part of the range. So you go and you shoot the targets, run forward to the next part of the range. And what was the next part of the range? It was a military outpost, an IDF military outpost they copied each and every single part of this military outpost, and it was the exact same thing in Israel. They wrote in Hebrew, everything. They knew exactly what it looked like. and keep in mind this is one Kilometre from Nir Oz, open field. All Israel had to do was put up a drone, send it over and they'd see they're training to mass-murder Jews. I think about when I came to this range. I said how on earth has the leadership been so poor that even this, a Kilometre away, they couldn't pick up?

DK: I don't think they didn't pick it up. I think they for sure knew about this. That's the sad reality. The intel knew every square inch of what was going on in Gaza to my understanding, satellite footage, etc. I highly doubt that this shooting range, this training facility, passed by the leadership. For sure the intelligence community knew about this. I know a lot of the terrorists even filmed themselves and that footage got leaked and apprehended by the intelligence community. So they obviously knew that there was this level of training taking place. After the US pull-out from Afghanistan, the terrorists went out through the Philadelphi Corridor and got the best training, the best weapons best and everything from al-Qaeda up in Afghanistan. So these guys definitely had training from all kinds of areas.

EA: They were really incredible fighters. Their CQB tactics, their guerilla warfare tactics, they were smart and look, they dragged out a war till now. That's crazy and that's solely on our part, of our poor—listen, war cannot be fought in a Western manner. If you fight war in a Western manner, you will never win. Imperial Japan in World War II collapsed for one reason: we did something that was extremely non-Western: we dropped two nuclear bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that ended it. Nazi Germany collapsed because we went into Berlin and we destroyed everything, no mercy, the Soviets and the Americans. You can't go into war like America did in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and use diplomacy and lawyers. That's not how war is fought. Evil does not care about laws. They will use that to their benefit, which is exactly what Hamas did and does.

DK: There's a really powerful quote by Tim Kennedy, a special warfare individual, Green Beret, "We have lost the will to do what it takes to win in war," and just like you pointed out with World War II, America had an objective to do whatever it takes to win in the Second World War against the Nazis, against the Japanese, against everyone who posed a threat to United States and to Europe. I'm waiting for Israel to regain that perspective, because I know that we know how to fight a war and we also know how to end a war if we really want to. It's a matter of the will to do it and and not give a flip about what the world says and the naysayers say. They're not in this. They're not in this.

EA: The peak of this war, the peak combat, was up until January, February 2024. All of my friends and I agree that this war should have ended and been won already by then. And now the war it's being fought with lawyers. How can we fight? How can we not fight? How much rice should we give the Gazans, aka Hamas? How much fuel should we give them, and at the same time, I'm going in every day risking my life, every day for a war that's only being continued when it can so easily end. We don't want a war. We don't want another year, two years. We want to end it fast. We want to win and win requires violence and violence wins wars, not hugs and kisses. And I really wish the leadership would see that.

When with my position in the army [as a D9 operator] you see everything on the battlefield and you're the front line of everything: you see the tunnels, you see the magnitude of the tunnels, you see the hospitals, the schools that are all terrorist facilities and then you come home you see the news, you see the politicians and it puts you in such a low state of mind, it destroys morale, because we so badly want to win. Let us win!

Let me fight. I'm going one time and that's it. I don't need to go 100 times. There are people, their families here are destroyed, because we keep deploying them to areas where their friends keep dying and they know they're next in line. Let us go in, let us win. A big part of me also says, why do I keep doing this? Why would I keep going back? My leadership's not there for me.

I'm a simple soldier and I'm at the end of the chain of command. I'm the one who's actually fighting the war. Let me actually fight it. I don't want to see my enemy get fed. I want my enemy to die. I want them to die, but as I'm fighting them, they're making shawarma. I don't want my enemy to eat a really good shawarma. I want him to die and if my leadership gives me that, then I'll go back.

DK: Can you explain what happened and what led to you getting injured in Gaza?

EA: We were in central Gaza. We were building the Netzarim Corridor. The Netzarim corridor is a brilliant strategy the army used to divide northern and southern Gaza. Northern Gaza is extremely densely populated, and southern Gaza. The center is pretty much all open terrain. So we took it and cut right through [east to west]. They took my battalion along with the Nahal infantry brigade. The Nahal infantry brigade was guarding the area as my engineering battalion was doing engineering operations. We were uncovering tunnels and destroying all infrastructure to make almost a desert there.

In this area we found one massive tunnel in two different locations. It was the largest tunnel found in Gaza, 10 Km long, which is crazy to think. A 10 km long logistics tunnel going from northern to southern Gaza. It took us two weeks to dig up in both locations, so that's about a month of excavating. We had excavators in lines. The tunnel we found ran outside of the Turkish Hospital and outside the Environmental University of Gaza. This hospital was almost a bunker. It went three stories into the ground, had massive generators and it wasn't really for hospital use. It was used for this tunnel that was going through. That's why the tunnel was strategically built to pass through the hospital and through the university.

At the same time, we were operating in Zeitoun and I was wounded in battle on March 6 2024. I later learned that I had more wounds from this wound. We had an armoured excavator that was destroyed. Another thing the D9 does is extract vehicles. People don't talk about the extractions that happen on the spot in battle. That's us, the D9s. We have a unit called 669, our power paramedic commandos. We come up to the vehicles, we extract them whether they're wounded, even if they're dead. For an hour, I was extracting a destroyed armoured excavator four Kilometres back to Israel and it didn't have brakes. It was completely in neutral, so every time we stopped, it hit me in the back. I had spinal injury and soft tissue damage. That was a month in rehabilitation, but the injury was also from so much more. I then realised that getting hit with RPGs and blowing up every day and losing a lot of friends in the war—I lost over forty friends some I was very close with; some I just had a cup of coffee with in battle.

I was a month in rehabilitation and I noticed everything start to settle. That's when I realised, mentally, I wasn't all right. So I went to the mental health officer and he sent me to psychiatrists. They told me I can't fight anymore. I have to go to the IDF's PTSD Center, which they opened up in the war. I was there for two months and saw all these specialists and a neurologist. He told me that my injury is a lot more complex than just PTSD and a spinal injury. He told me I have TVI [traumatic vascular injury] which is traumatic brain injury, that I have brain damage. He told me that's from all the explosions that I was exposed to. I was exposed to thousands of explosions and it created a lot of brain damage and all the extractions from the buildings I was taking down was essentially just a car accident every day. So I had severe tissue damage, spinal injury and a brain injury on top of all that PTSD, and obviously the good old tinnitus I can never get rid of.

They decided to discharge me and I've been in rehabilitation for over a year already and really, though the tissue damage and all that stuff, as hard as it is, it's liveable. But the hardest of all the injuries is by far is the PTSD. I wish for nobody to have to go through that.

The D9s is probably the most operational unit in this war, because it's non-stop work. Maybe the infantrymen will rest in their building, the D9 is nonstop. You're sent to the front line. You're never going to be the second, third, fourth one to go into battle. You're always the first, which means you're always going to see the worst of the worst, and the RPGs that are going to be fired, they're going to you. And the explosives that are going to be blown up, they're going to blow up on you. And the people who are going to die, you're going to be the one to see them die, because we have windows, we were not in a tin can. We see everything and it scars you, but it's not a scar, because a scar heals. It's a wound and it never leaves. There's no prosthetic for the soul. There isn't really a way to fix it and that's what's so difficult about it.

DK: It's definitely not easy to be at the forefront. I know with my unit, we did a lot of work with and around the D9s. Like you said, they're the first ones in, they're the last ones out. I know you know we appreciated knowing that you guys cleared the area so that we could push forward, that we knew that area was somewhat clean from IEDs and other threats that would be devastating for the foot soldiers. It's life-saving work. It's hard work and, like you say, it's also emotionally mauling and scarring. That is something that you guys are going to have to process through after this war. God willing that there is an after with this war.

Brother, I really appreciate your sacrifice. I thank you for your service, for being willing to serve in the unit that you chose, and to make Aliyah. To do it, that's not something that I take lightly.

Supplement

Brigadier General Amir Avivi revealed the latest very welcome D9 developments on 21 April 2025:

You have different kinds of D9. You have D9M. You have the D9R. What makes the D9T special is that it's all computerised and digital. [We have the] capability of interfacing with the computer of the D9 and make it completely robotic. In the beginning of the war we had very, very few D9s that are completely robotic. But very quickly it became clear that it's something that we really need and the army with the industries moved forward to create more and more D9s.

Sending a D9 without soldiers, operating the D9 from afar, it's much, much, much safer and reduces the risk to the soldiers, because in a D9, usually you have two soldiers. The D9s are not armoured the way tanks are. They're less fortified and therefore, it's a danger to the soldiers um and if you can operate them from afar. This is a huge advantage and the army really now utilises them more and more.

Just in time for Efraim Abrams to resume his favourite way of fighting Israel's enemies: with a bulldozer.

Picture credit:

Screenshot from https://youtu.be/P0XOlfOjS78