First, there was silence.
Only the muted give of brush under the weight of their packs. The elite engineering corps of the IDF slid down the steep incline, boots failing for purchase, gravity taking the rest. The white of their night vision scopes bled through the rain and the black, flattening the Litani River into a pale line below.
Then the sky fell.
Mortars from a hundred Hezbollah positions. Fast enough that the air buckled before the sound reached them.
One dead and twenty-seven injured.
No air cover.
Nothing above them but the storm.
Nothing but their cries as the wounded treated the wounded under fire, their blood finding the river and flowing west.
I should have been there.
By the time my half-empty flight from LAX landed at Ben Gurion, my unit was pulling out of Lebanon. Resetting. Preparing to head back in.
This time, I went with them.
Which is how I ended up on the outskirts of Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah stronghold just across the border.
More rain.
Tall weeds slap against my cheeks as I crouch in an open field. Black exhaust from the nearest tank settles in my lungs. The mansion beside us, the one we’ll come to call home, has already been shelled. No Radwan fighters found inside.
I don’t really grasp where we are until morning.
With first light comes a view of rolling hills, green in every direction, stretching farther than seems reasonable. Sprawling estates scattered across them. Massive. Out of place. They look like they belong in Tuscany, though I can’t say for sure. I’ve never been.
These villas are our mission. One by one. Leave nothing standing.
Suicide drones overhead. Constant shelling. Not a soul in sight.
Groundhog Day with bullets.
Each structure we clear and set for demolition feels the same. Too quiet. Too clean. Our radios echo through cavernous marble halls.
Images of Khamenei stare up from books. Down from framed photos on polished walls.
These are not random homes.
They are positions.
Staging grounds.
It’s like floating through a dream. Everything’s a little off. Liminal.
Strange place to spend Passover.
Boom.
Another day. Another estate.
My team’s geeking out over the BMW in the drive. No license plate yet. Still has that new car smell. The hood’s up on a dual-turbo engine, but I’m focused on the black jihadist headband left on the dash.
Boom.
A lieutenant takes shrapnel. He was chewing matzah in our makeshift command center an hour ago, and now he’s naked on a stretcher, wondering if he’ll keep the eye.
Another day.
Or is it the same.
I’m trying to remember the last time I stood still.
My boots track mud across a marble floor that was never meant to see it. I stop at the base of a double spiral staircase that leads nowhere. Open sky where three stories once stood.
I unclasp my helmet, despite the danger.
I need space to think.
It shouldn’t be possible to ruin a place like this.
I sit at the edge of an empty pool, boots hanging over rainwater turned brown with debris.
I don’t want to be here.
I don’t want to leave.
No Seder. No time for questions. Just the work.
A holiday about remembering, spent in a place built to erase.
Izzy Ezagui, a decorated squad commander in the Israel Defense Forces, is the only soldier to lose an arm in combat and return to the battlefield. In 2011, former President Shimon Peres awarded him one of Israel’s highest military honors. Izzy continues to serve in an elite reserve unit and delivers talks across the U.S. and internationally. His story has been featured in The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera America, Fox News, and on The Dr. Phil Podcast. The Algemeiner included him in its list of the ‘Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life.’
Most recently, during Operation Swords of Iron, Izzy served with a Combat Engineering Recon Unit in Gaza, demolishing homes of terrorists involved in the October 7 Massacre. On the northern front, he escorted journalist Douglas Murray into Lebanon and took part in a high-risk cross-border mission to dismantle Hezbollah’s largest terror tunnel, which required 400 tons of explosives.