Episode 313: Unveiling the Truth: IDF Soldier Recounts Straightforward Events of October 7th

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins.

You're listening to Habits and Hustle, Gresham.

This always happens, and I try so hard for this not to because I want it to seem like, okay, so I have

a great conversation before.

Yeah, I don't want to have a conversation with you before because then I'm going to ask you the same questions.

I have a podcast in Israel that hasn't come out yet because of the 7th of October.

Stop it.

Also, a podcast with you?

Okay, so I have.

It's my podcast.

Yeah, I know.

You're the host of the podcast.

What kind of podcast is it?

It's called, in Hebrew, it sounds so much better.

It's called Lochamime Dablim, which means combat soldiers talking.

It doesn't sound good in English, but it's basically.

It doesn't translate.

Yeah, it doesn't sound like it.

I mean, it sounds really good in Hebrew, like Lochamime Dablim.

It's like uh

friends talking, it feels like it sounds like it's so it's friends talking, but like combat soldiers talking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I need to find a better

name, name in English.

But so, it's about just combat soldiers that are in the industry.

I have actors coming and and that already came, and singers and different performers, stand-up comedians.

So you have everybody basically.

Everybody come that were combat soldiers and how they deal with what they went through in the army in their life after as a known person in the Israeli industry.

Oh, that's really interesting.

Well, it's interesting because maybe for those who don't know, number one, I want to just introduce who you are.

Okay.

I'm going to say the name wrong, I feel, but Yadin Gelman.

Perfect.

Who was a soldier.

He got badly hurt, now is obviously recovering nicely, it seems.

Yeah.

But he's actually a very famous actor in Israel, and he had to go back into the army because of what happened on March 7th.

But in Israel, everybody when they turn 18, guy, girl, doesn't matter,

that is part of it.

They have to be,

they go right into the army regardless, right?

And everybody does reserves.

Like, what I had to explain a lot to people here is that people didn't understand how I'm also an actor and also a soldier.

Yes, explain that.

That was a lot of the questions I was getting to.

Yeah.

So in Israel, we have to do reserves, especially combat soldiers.

You finish the army and then you do reserves.

So we do reserves every month for you.

What does that mean?

Explain what that means.

You go in to train.

You train for war, for

combat situations.

Yeah.

Every month?

Every month, yeah.

You go in and train.

For how long?

So if something like this happens, you know what to do.

And you have all your equipment ready for you, your gun, your own equipment, your own shoes that wait for you there, your own bag, everything.

Yeah.

For how long?

Like, how long does that go on?

Until you're 50 years old.

Yeah.

Forever.

Where do they even have space and room to keep your gun, your clothes?

So there are units that are built just to storage the clothes and the equipment of reserves.

Huge hangers, just like

waiting for us.

So then you go, so explain this.

So then you turn 18 you go into the army for what four years three years three years yeah is the mandatory and then I did seven so why did you do seven so I went into special forces which automatically means I sign on another year that's the first thing that the day you go in you sign on another year so I did four that I had to do and then I went to officers course my fourth year so I had to stay on more and then I became a commander so I had to stay on more and I loved what I was doing I felt like I'm doing the most important thing a human being can do in Israel for sure.

That's what I felt at all times.

And so, can any, how did you even become a special forces?

Can you describe like, what's the process?

I mean, can anyone just do it?

So it's like here, it's very hard.

You can for sure do it, but I don't know about that.

So it's like, first of all, it's everybody's dream to become, like, to go into the army and get as high as you can.

Is that like a Navy SEALs?

And is it the same equivalent?

So it's the same.

So it's equivalent of like the Delta Forest or the Green Berets.

The Navy SEALs is what's called shayetet in israel which is whoever's in charge of the navy right i mean more like the delta force like the high level it's like the high level right so what you do is before when you're 18 you start doing mental tests and psychological tests to see like where you are and also just regular tests of like mechanical things and your brain and iq and all those tests and then when you finish that you start doing physical tests and then you do a day of physical tests and then two days of physical tests and then you finish that you go back to

psychological tests.

And then you do a week of extreme physical tests all week where they just try to break you mentally all week.

That's what you do.

Give me some examples of how, what kind of training would they do?

So, first of all, you have no watch all week.

Of course, no phone, but no watch.

So you don't know at all what time it is.

You go to sleep and they'll wake you up.

an hour later and you won't know if you slept if you didn't sleep you have no idea what's going on so they tell you to start sprinting and then you sprint and then they tell you to stop when you get to 20 and then when you get oh they tell you to yell out 20 when you get to 20 you get to 20 and then they tell you to keep going and then after that you start crawling and you're racing all the time you're racing people and you crawl and you finish that and they tell you to pack up sandbags as heavy as you can put on your back and start climbing up a mountain and then you do that with stretchers and then you sprint two stretchers stretchers and whoever gets first gets to take the stretcher.

So if you get there first, you're punished because it's harder, but everybody wants to get there first.

So you're always like battling the rest of your team.

And then after three days and three nights of that, they cut out half of the people.

So you start like a thousand, they cut out 500 on the spot.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then the rest of the week, four days later, they like the elite 500 that stayed do that into in different teams.

Continue the training and all week, they're training your mind as well.

So in the middle of sprinting, they'll give you a riddle.

Just throw out a riddle and they say, whoever knows the answer, raise your hand.

And then you start sprinting.

And then suddenly somebody answers the riddle.

And then another one answers the riddle.

And then, yeah, so they try to break you at all times.

After two days, I had somebody put a gun in my head.

Like while we were crawling, just slammed the gun in my head.

Slammed it or just pointed it?

No, by accident, when when we were crawling.

He just smashed it in my face.

Yeah, I had a concussion and I kept going.

With a concussion?

I had a concussion.

They asked me if I can keep going.

I kept going.

I had my entire face was purple till the end of the week.

That's the only reason I went through because they saw, like, okay, he can deal with it.

Wow.

And they're like, and they're like, basically, like, shouting like riddles because they want to see if you're mentally acute and like Abe.

And the while you're suffering

and physically, you're just going to the edge, you can still use your brain and be focused at all times.

Yeah.

And there's like fighting also.

Like they put you in a ring and strongest man that stays in the ring, go.

So what's so interesting is like Israel's known to have like the best army in the world, right?

How does the training for the Israeli army compare to like the training for the Delta Force for the special forces part?

Do you know?

Have you ever found out or asked?

I have trained with the Delta Force and the Rangers and the SEALs in different occasions.

Yeah, there's a lot like of work that we do together, a lot of training that we do together.

First of all, the main difference is that it's better for the U.S.

military is that we go in at a really young age

and we go in for three years or four years or even seven years.

But in the U.S.

military, it's a career.

And they go in at a much, I mean, even if they go in at 25, you're not 18.

You're 25.

You're already, you're much more stable.

You're not a kid.

You're not a kid anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's their career.

They look at it as careers.

That's what they want to do.

The combat soldiers sometimes are 20 years just combat soldiers they don't become officers they don't move forward they're just combat soldiers so they're much more professional i'd say the main difference though between both armies is we fight on our land on our houses like we fight for our people and we see our people with our own eyes the u.s military gets sent to the other side of the world so when we fight we feel like if they kill us that's it i mean the family behind me is dead and it gives us, I think, a much like stronger drive to win.

Right.

Because you, because it's, you, it's basically you, your people.

Yeah, it's our people.

Like, the survivor mentality is so strong that way.

But in terms of the actual tangible, practical training techniques, is it very similar?

It's very similar.

Yeah, it's very similar.

And we, we

like change information a lot.

We switch between us information.

Like if they come up with a new technique, it just happened a few months ago.

They have a new technique of taking over a room.

They'll share it with us and then we'll share information about how we did it, how we trained.

So it's very similar.

I think during the training, they get pushed a little more to the edge in terms of training.

But after, when you're already a combat soldier, it's pretty much you go through the same things.

Because the mental toughness that you have to kind of endure is unbelievable.

And because you guys are so young,

what's like the, I mean, are they more lenient to who gets in versus like they're 25 25 trying out for the green berets, let's say, versus, you know, the special forces in Israel because you are 18, we're doing it.

Do they kind of allow more lenience of who's able to go in to the army in the first place in the special forces?

Or it's not, they don't think of it that way.

No, I think they have their tests and they know what they're testing for.

What they're looking for, and that's who goes in.

But for someone like you, you were 18.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what was your background before?

Because you were just like, you were a kid.

Were you always mentally tough?

Were you strong-willed?

Were you athletic?

What were you like?

So I was, if I go way back, I grew up in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada.

And then during the Second Intifada, you were walking around the streets and buses were exploding.

in front of your face and coffee houses were exploding and there was the pizza uh in sibaro pizza that blew up a terrorist bomber blew up inside a suicide bomber and killed so many people and then there was the dolphinarium in tel aviv where he hurt 130 people i think and then park hotel in a tanya and you grow up during that time and every day is a risk and you go to school and it's a risk and that's already a moment when you realize okay i got to toughen up and i remember as a kid looking for terrorists in my own eyes i'm 10 years old i'm 12 years old and i get on the bus and i'm looking for terrorists to see if he's a terrorist should i get off should i should i fight them should i don't know what i'll do of course i wouldn't fight them but i mean you're looking at it you're much more aware so that mental toughness you grow with it.

It has to be there.

And then the other like messed up thing is that you grow up to your friends and family being killed all the time and people being kidnapped and terrorist organizations calling for your death from right and from left at all times, if it's the Fatach or if it's Hamas or if it's Hezbollah or Iran, it doesn't matter.

It's always coming.

I remember during the Second Lebanon War, we were preparing our gas masks and we would cut off pictures of the terrorists and put them on the gas masks for like, these are the guys that want to kill us.

We're going to, we're going to win.

And I was, I don't know, 13 years old or 15 years old.

That's just how you were raised.

That's how we were, how we were raised.

Oh, no, I was 12.

Sorry.

I was 12 years old.

Yeah.

I mean, to like grow up in that way, that's why like I think Israelis in general are just so tough because that was like, they have to be.

That's like how you were kind of built because that's what you saw.

That was part of your life.

Like, did you have a lot of people, even like when you were younger, you said, did you have a lot of close relatives that died that in these suicide bombers i know from canada i wasn't allowed my mom wouldn't allow me we had to we had a school trip to go to israel my mom would not allow me to go on the school trip because the year before

my mom's friend's daughter went and she was on the beach and there was a suicide bomber that blew up the beach and the and the daughter died oh my god terrible so i wasn't allowed to go that happened and that was like that was kind of like because my mom's israeli by the way too um yeah from kaifa but that was like i remember just from living in canada like people i knew of who were even visiting there yeah were killed i can't even imagine living there your whole life growing up there what could have happened yeah how many people you must have known yeah you always know and that that was like until today that's the thing that we fear the most is you open up your phone and you look at the news and you see somebody you know or the instinct is now when there's a rocket or a terrorist bombing or an attack or any sort of thing you send messages to whoever lives there that you know that's the first thing you do you take out your phone and you send a message because it could be anyone and you know it that's how you live and then once in I don't know how many people it is it's somebody you know and then you go bury a friend or you go bury a family member or yeah but then like I hear people who live there who always feel safe they're always like I feel safe living there like walking around like and like they don't feel like it's dangerous like even people now who are there right they're not they don't feel like I'm like my friends who are going there, I'm like, aren't you scared?

They're like, no, I don't feel scared.

So that's the other side.

I mean, you always feel like that's happening around you, but you don't, I mean, you keep your head up high.

I've never not felt safe walking around Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, or I studied in Gushazion, where the three kids were kidnapped in 2014.

I studied 500 meters or a kilometer from the bus stop that they were kidnapped from.

Never felt like

my life was in danger.

And we knew that people were getting kidnapped, people were getting killed.

And we didn't, like, we would not let that like put us down.

We would keep our head high.

And that's, that was, that's like the amazing, like, what's so different about, yes, you feel like there's always terrorist attacks going on, but you'll never let it get to you.

You'll always keep on going.

You'll always keep your head up high.

And that's the mentality that we grew up with.

Even though it's a part of your life.

Yeah.

It's not something that you're not.

Not even though.

Because it's a part of your life.

Yeah.

It's anyways a part of your life.

Keep your head up high.

That's incredible.

I mean, that, but even people who, it's not part of their life, I guess we just say, like, I was like, like tourists and visitors, like I told you, like even after, you know, after October 7th, and my friends have been going there a lot for different, you know, for to see what was happening and to kind of bring awareness and all these things who have not grown up like that.

And they don't feel scared, which is what I find to be just miraculous.

Like, how is that possible?

They didn't have this.

They don't have the same mental toughness that you have been, you know, know, fortunate enough to kind of have, which is amazing.

So then you, okay, so then you go, you finish the army.

Then why did your four years then turn into seven?

So then you do the special forces.

What was the other three years?

Officer's course.

What is that?

Like, tell me what this means.

Talk to me like I'm a dummy.

Yeah.

Officer's course is basically you go to like a school.

Okay.

What's it called in the U.S.?

University College.

There's the school, the officer's school for the military, something point.

Oh, Dana Point?

No.

No.

Oh, you're asking the wrong person.

Ah, something point.

Never mind.

It's the officer's course here.

It's basically you go to study tactics, different tactics of how to fight, and you practice being the commander in the fight instead of being just the soldier.

Oh, now you're running your unit.

Now you're running not the unit, but like your team or your squad or that battle, or you're running what's going on.

So you learn how to kind of think differently, think out of the box, get different solutions that you can to attack.

Let's say, so this house, you can either come in the front door, which is the obvious solution, or I don't know, I can blow up the wall and come in through the wall, or come in through the wood of this

ceiling,

or come in from under, whatever.

So there are so many different ways that you can attack.

So that's what you learn in officer school, the different ways to command, to attack, to be with soldiers.

And it's a few months of just basically school.

And then you go out in the field and kind of just do whatever you studied.

So you're basically like in charge of that.

You become like a commander

in charge of that unit.

In charge of your force.

Your force.

How big is your force?

The numbers change, and I'm not allowed to say exactly how many the numbers are.

Oh, okay.

It changes, yeah.

Okay, and so then you do that for three years.

No, so officer's course you do for a few months.

For a few months, but then you do that.

And then I get back to my unit and I stay on for a few years.

That's what I mean.

So then you did that, you were the commander, I guess you would say.

Like a force, a smaller force.

A small force.

Yeah.

Okay.

For three years, for three years, right?

Okay.

Then when did you become like, so then you leave and now how, now you're what?

Now you're 25-ish?

26.

26, okay.

Then you go and you're like, hey, I want to become an actor.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I'll take you back.

Okay.

I'll take you back to, it was 2013.

So I'm just a few months in.

Okay.

And to get accepted, like after you get accepted into the unit, so for them to accept you inside the base, like our special forces base, you have to go through a few months of training.

Until then, you're always out in the the field sleeping in tents.

You have no home base.

Yeah.

Cause you're not like good enough yet.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

Yeah.

They treat you like you're a rookie.

Yeah.

They treat you like that.

Yeah.

So you're eating out, you're sleeping out.

You don't see, you don't have a watch, you don't have a phone.

You have no idea what day it is, what time it is, what's going on.

You just keep going.

So that's for a few months.

So during those few months, you do like these hikes.

Now, a hike means you have 60% of your body weight on you with all your equipment, your gun, gun, your helmet, everything, and stretchers.

So there's stretchers with a few hundred kilos on them, and you're walking with stretchers.

And the last hike is 90 kilometers, which is, I'd say, about 45, 50 miles.

So that's the last.

Miles?

Yeah, miles.

With all that stuff on you?

Yeah.

So that's the last without stopping.

You don't stop.

You walk the whole, I don't know, night, whatever it is.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

So that's the last one.

So the one before that, which is 75 kilometers.

So I'm walking.

You're not allowed to talk, of course, the entire night.

And you're walking and you have two like stretchers and everybody, you switch the two that are in front of you all the time.

And you do like this kind of carousel-like thing.

So I'm in the beginning, me and my friend, and we get switched.

We go to the back and he says to me quietly, because you're not allowed to talk, he says to me, so

what's your dream like after the army?

And we're 19 years old.

I mean, we just started.

And I think about it and I tell him, you know what?

I think I'm going to be an actor.

And then we both start laughing.

And then our commander yells at us, everybody, be quiet, you're not allowed to talk.

And we keep going.

Okay.

And that's it.

And I never talked about it after that.

Never, because I went to officers' course and had nothing to do with acting.

And you're a soldier and you have no feelings and you're a killing machine.

And that's what you do.

And then I had one year left, which the start of that one year was the 2018 conflict on the Gaza border, which for me was, okay,

I saw that and I said, I've seen enough.

They just, what they did, what the Hamas terrorists did was they put a line of kids kids and then a line of women.

I remember them holding their hands.

And then all the terrorists are behind them.

And so, I mean, you can't do anything.

You can't shoot.

You can't attack.

You can't do anything.

You can only start when the kids move around or the women move or something opens up and the terrorists come forward, which barely happens because the kids are sent to cut the border.

It's just messed up.

So I saw that and I said, okay, this is the end.

I've seen enough.

I've done enough.

I felt like I've done enough for my country.

I had one year left with an operation in that year.

And I said, okay, I'll do the operation and then I'm done.

I'm finished.

And I was thinking what I wanted to do after.

And I got offered very good jobs after.

And I told you.

It's not like LA.

It's not like being in the US, right?

Like to do all this stuff.

What do you mean?

Like, okay, sorry.

I'll tell you, Africa.

Okay, go ahead.

Yeah.

Okay.

No, no, no, no, go ahead.

So I had one year and I thought about what I was going to do.

And I asked my commander if I could go out once a week to do an acting course.

And he thought, of course, that I'm going to do one, one lesson and then come back to the army.

They offered me another seven years deal to stay in the army.

And I said, so let me do the acting course and then I'll think and then I'll figure out what I want to do.

And I did the acting course, which I was terrible at, terrible, absolutely terrible.

And I loved it.

I loved every second of it.

And I kept on doing the course.

I did two courses.

I finished the second one, started doing the auditions for acting school, did auditions for acting school, all this during my last year in the army, which nobody knows about except for my commander.

Not even my family, not my teammates.

Nobody knew about it until I got in.

I remember the phone call.

I got in.

I told my commander, I'm out.

I'm done.

He thought I was kidding.

No, I said, I'm done.

I got out in July 2019, started October 2019, three months later.

Really?

What was your first job?

Like as an actor?

So I started October 2019.

I got good very fast because I worked very, very hard.

Also, you have no, like I was saying to you earlier, you have no accent my dad's American and my mom's Canadian they're I have to give them all the credit they spoke strictly English in the house okay just just so that we'll grow up without an accent okay your mom's from where Toronto you're Canadian yeah no wonder I like you so much you are Canadian holy crap okay and where's your dad from South Carolina Okay, so this so your parents moved to Israel?

Yeah, they moved separately to work like on a kibbutz for a year.

Really?

Met there, fell in love, stayed forever.

But you

were, you were born in Israel.

They met there in Israel and stayed in Israel forever and then never left.

And all four kids were born in Israel.

And so you spoke, like you said, English all the time.

All the time, and with my siblings, Hebrew.

So in one conversation in the house, you'll hear both languages just going through the sentence without us even knowing.

Like we'll just talk to siblings and parents in different languages.

Do your parents talk to each other in Hebrew?

In English, too.

But they have perfect Hebrew.

They just won't speak Hebrew to us and you will have English okay so because you're Hebrew like so you you're technically Israeli though right I'm a hundred percent Israeli right so like even though your parents are not but like all your but I mean they've been there for 42 years now so they're absolutely Israeli no yeah but I'm saying is that why you don't have an accent oh yeah because they spoke only English so for four years until I went to kindergarten or three years, I didn't even know about Hebrew.

They would only speak English at home.

And then I went into kindergarten, started speaking Hebrew, but I would come home and speak English until I was 18, until I left for the army.

My best friends from Jerusalem, same deal.

Their parents are from the U.S., moved to Jerusalem to like an Anglo-Saxon environment.

All my friends speak English, and we speak English between the friends.

You do?

In Tel Aviv, yeah.

We'll walk in the Tel Aviv streets speaking English.

So you don't speak Hebrew to your friend, because the Hebrew accent is so heavy.

It's so heavy, yeah.

And you speak like you look like it like just like a Canadian-American boy just hanging out.

When I go to like Europe,

I'll speak English in an Israeli accent because they don't get, they don't understand the American accent.

So I'll go to Barcelona and I'll go to a taxi guy and say, we need the taxi now to hotel

quickly, $100, no more.

And then, yeah.

It works every day.

And it works.

Oh my gosh.

So is that why you became so successful as an actor though there?

Oh, no, I spoke.

So I did only one job in English in Israel.

Oh, okay.

But I played a British agent, so like a British spy.

So I had to do a whole course of a few months to switch my entire accent to a British accent.

And then I acted in British.

And then, yeah.

And all the Israeli roles I had in Israel, I did like an Israeli accent for my English.

Wow.

Okay.

So what was your first job that you got, though?

You were saying that I couldn't believe that you sound like this.

It's crazy to me.

And my English has gotten better since I've been in the U.S.

for what four days?

Yeah, I can feel it like getting better.

Like the rust kind of gets off.

Yeah, that is amazing.

That is amazing because I would never, if you didn't tell, if like Brad or you didn't say that you were like Israeli, I would never have known it.

People say I have like a mix of American and Canadian, like they can hear it's a mix.

It's like me.

Yeah, like you.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

Oh my God, you could be like my brother.

Okay.

This is so crazy.

Okay, go on.

So then you're trying.

So I started school in October 2019.

And while I was in school, I would do like acting courses online in English to kind of get like just understand what's going on.

And then three months into school, I met a casting director of the biggest Israeli director in Israel, Avi Nesha.

He was in Hollywood.

He did two Hollywood movies, came back to Israel.

So he was casting a new movie

about the independence war.

Okay.

1948 in kibbutz nitzanim about a kibbutz, which, yeah, which is going to sound crazy to you, about a kibbutz, that small squad of soldiers with an elite commander, played by me, come to the kibbutz to protect them from the attack of the Egyptians in 1948.

This may sound like I'm talking about October 7th.

I'm talking about 1948.

They were sent and they get into a brutal fight, and he gets shot.

I can't believe you're finding this out right now, but he gets shot four bullets on his left side, the commander, which I played,

and dies on spot.

It's a true story.

And I played him.

So that was my first acting role.

I'm cutting three years later to October 7th of me and my team getting sent to kibbutz Beri to save the kibbutz from the attack of Hamas and me getting shot four bullets.

Luckily, I survived.

But yeah, the like it was crazy.

Oh my God.

And you played that commander?

So that was the movie they were casting.

She saw me.

She didn't even know who I was.

She found out my name, my agency, called me in for an audition.

I did one audition.

Then I did an audition every single day for that same week until I did a chemistry test with the lead actress and a meeting with the director.

And we started talking.

The first thing he said to me was, there are much more famous actors than you that are on for this role.

We're just meeting.

That's how we started.

And we ended with him saying, you got the role.

This is your role.

So in an hour and a half conversation, that's how I got my first job.

Yeah.

Wow.

that is so eerie.

Yeah.

And then that became you.

That became my reality.

Yeah, exactly.

And I, I mean, when I like talk about it, I show people the video of him getting shot, four bullets on his left side.

Yeah.

And it's me.

And you're looking at me dying on screen.

Yeah.

That is like giving me chills.

That is so insane.

It is insane.

It is.

It's insane.

When you see that, like, what doesn't it freak you out?

It freaks me out.

I'll tell you another crazy thing.

I play in, uh, I act in a play in Tel Aviv about a gay couple that there was a terror attack in 2009 in a Tel Aviv gay club, in an LGBTQ club.

Two people died, 11 were injured.

I play one of the ones that were injured.

And my boyfriend is a religious kid.

And that's how he comes out of the closet in front of his parents.

Because, so it's an amazing story based on different real events.

And I start that play with a cast on my arm.

And And I did the play since I went on once to try and do it again.

It was insane.

It was insane.

Yeah.

This isn't, this is like unbelievably surreal and like eerie that this is actually like it's life imitating art

in every way.

Yeah.

And like it's like foreshadowing your life.

That is so crazy.

It's insane.

Yeah.

Like manifesting my future in so many different ways through art and then that imitating life and that imitating art.

Like it was such a crazy like a circle yeah like a circle oh my gosh so like then walk me through this so then now you're acting you're doing your thing you're becoming very successful you're doing you're doing more like tv shows movies a combination of both um a combination more movies like bigger parts in movies than what i've done on tv shows but i've done them both like are you like for example if i were to go with you to israel would people be like going crazy for you like fans and stuff like that so people would be stopping me on the street it's not like uh i don't know it's not like leo ros walking down the street it's not gal gadot oh galgadot okay yeah yeah yeah okay i was gonna say who it's not that but you're not galgadot no not galgadot okay okay yet but yeah people know me people know who i am people have seen the movies have seen the show i mean the play it's like you give me a comparison like you're like as famous as who in the u.s like like what would you say like you're not like a leo new

like um i can't remember his name something pit brad yeah brad like brad pitt so yeah you're like a brad something like that kind of kind of yeah you know like give or take a like i don't think i got his name right yeah brad pitt brad pitt pick yeah yes brad pitt or you're like a brad pitt are you like a bradley cooper or like um no brad cooperation i know i know i'm joking you're probably like a i don't know i don't know like a zach efron no what everybody knows zach efron okay you're right it's pretty popular yeah he's popular but you're but in israel people know me people know me like if i were to walk around would your would your face be on like covers of magazines so first of all yes my face is going going to be on a cover of a magazine in two weeks.

In America?

I mean, in Israel?

Yeah, okay.

I mean, in the cover of the front page of the most popular newspaper.

So that's happening soon.

And I have two movies coming out in Israel in February and March.

So my face is going to be everywhere now.

Okay, so you're like a popular actor.

Okay.

So you're not maybe like...

You're not Bradley Cooper, but I do different movies.

You're like a B list versus an A list.

Yes.

Okay, exactly.

And now soon, okay, so this is what's on

it.

this guy.

I'm not just saying this, he is literally going to be like a humongous star in the U.S.

I'm telling you, everybody in like the U.S.

that he came, he came to LA to meet all these people, and everybody wants to work with you.

You're going to be like, you're going to be huge.

It's been an amazing time.

No, you are.

You're going to be.

Okay, so then like, let's go through this.

So now you're doing your thing.

You're working in Israel.

You're doing all these movies, TV shows.

And doing reserves all the time.

I'm going every month.

And each time you go for the month for the reserves, how long is each reserve, though?

I'm so concerned.

So it changes.

It's sometimes three days just to like you know brush up like brush up a little yeah and then sometimes they take you for two weeks and train you to death okay so you don't you never know no you know before we know in advance right but like why is it like kind of back and forth why is it sometimes a few days why is it sometimes because it's different training so we trained which is also crazy but a few months ago we trained the entire army trained for a war on all fronts so that was two weeks long so we know that we have that training and we go in prepared for that.

And then you, you make the adjustments and you have two weeks off of work, whatever you're doing.

Everybody, I mean, I'm an actor, so I have two weeks off from movies, TV shows, plays.

My friends are business owners, go out for two weeks.

Other friends, high-tech, go out for two weeks.

All come and meet for these two weeks of fighting.

Right.

We just train all around.

And then a month later, so you have, I don't know, three days just to brush off.

So sometimes, though, like if you're on a movie set or something and then it comes up, you're going to be in there.

Do you have to work around this?

Like, is it like if you don't show up for that particular month because of your working schedule, are you allowed to miss something?

Yeah.

So in Israel, it's a law that

you're not allowed to not send somebody to reserves.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So you have to go.

Yeah, but because I'm in special forces, so I can talk to my commander, tell him, listen, I'm going on a, I'm flying out to film a movie.

I'll just join a different team next month.

I'll catch up on what I missed, and then I'll join you guys.

And so they allow you to do that.

It's a law that you can't miss it, but then you.

But because I'm in special forces, it's a different thing.

So the special forces has a different smaller.

Yeah, it's smaller.

You know, like the head of my unit now was my personal commander.

So I can call him up.

Right.

So you guys have a relationship.

It's like a real, it's like real life, right?

Like, you're not supposed to, but if you have a relationship.

You're like, you're going to have something that happened.

Right.

Like, they'll give you some leniency.

It's like, it's like a microcosm for like what happens in the real world.

Okay.

So, can I ask you a question before we get into all this other stuff?

Because it's like so intense.

and I want I want you to tell your story about October 7th.

How did anybody like did anybody in the army at all, your special forces, nobody knew this was attack was even being planned?

Like how can some like the Israeli army is supposed to be the best, the smartest, the fastest, the greatest?

How can nobody have known and then nobody be around for hours on end for like seven hours?

Like how did this even happen?

That's the question I know.

That's like the question that everybody wants to know.

Yeah.

So I'm breaking it up into different things.

Okay.

So people had intelligence for different things that they thought was going to happen.

Okay.

Different things they heard.

And it went up the chain of command.

It felt like the top of our chain was pushing down that everything is okay.

So everything you hear, just ignore it because everything is fine.

So don't worry.

That's what we feel like today.

That our top of our command was telling us who is the top of the command?

Our prime minister.

Like

our government.

okay they felt like hamas was totally taken care of and everything is fine and then once you hear that so much i think people started believing it but we do have lookout girls that saw hamas training i have pictures on my phone i can show you later that saw hamas training four days before the attack training fighting between sukkot just like that and they reported it and people told them never mind it's not happening we have uh uh lookout girls that talked about training inside Gaza, told their commanders, they told them, don't worry, nothing's going to happen.

An intelligence officer who also told them that she heard stuff that are happening, they told her, just forget about it, nothing's happening.

So the soldiers on the ground were doing their job as best as possible.

Up the chain of command, that's where the problem started to happen.

And so, I mean, we're an attack unit.

So we don't, we're not looking out.

We don't listen to the phone calls.

We don't listen to the intelligence.

We go out on missions.

So for us, we, I mean, it felt like Hamas is taken care of because that's the story that we were getting.

The Hamas is taking care of and they're doing what they can.

There were no more attack tunnels that were coming.

So we didn't think they were going to come out of the out of the tunnels.

And the people that were telling and warning and giving the signs, so people just weren't listening to them.

But why?

Why were they not listening?

That's the thing.

That's suspicious to me.

Like, how is that possible?

So you're telling me you literally have pictures on your phone of these lookout girls who are seeing them train, Hamas train.

They tell their commanders, their commanders are saying to them, ah, it's no big deal.

Don't worry about it.

And I'm saying it really nicely.

Their commanders told them to shut up, told them that if they want to keep their jobs, they should be quiet.

Like brutal things that they told those girls, those lookout girls.

And for no reason at all, they just ignored.

everything that they told them.

And I mean, everybody in Israel is going crazy about it.

Yeah.

And we don't have answers, especially because there's this weird saying of our government now that we'll deal with all the problems after the war.

For now, we're not dealing with any of our mistakes because it weakens us.

And we're saying the exact opposite.

Let's quickly see what our mistakes were, learn from them, and be prepared for the next thing that's going to happen.

And our government is just totally ignoring all the mistakes that they made just so that we don't see their mistakes.

So that means Israelis must be, well, they're really angry, I would imagine.

Like, but what's happening in Israel?

That's the thing.

I don't think America, whenever I say America, I mean like, you know, this,

North America, whatever, the world, knows really what, how Israelis feel in Israel.

Because, so it sounds to me like everyone's kind of like, what the hell happened here?

Like, is it, is it like a Netanyahu thing?

Like, do you think that there was something like, I don't want to, you know, this whole conspiracy theory thing, but like, then there was nobody even around for seven hours or 10 hours to even like there was, yeah, it was completely they moved the platoon out to the west bank and then nobody came back which we have no idea why how is that possible and we checked how long the drive is it's an hour drive from the west bank to gaza or an hour and a half we have no idea why it took seven hours and even after the soldiers got there nobody was there to give them the green light now i am breaking it up here because We came there and we didn't wait for a green light.

We went in.

We dove deep.

How long did it take you to get there?

So I was called at about 7 a.m it took me an hour to get to my base a little to get dressed up 9 30 ish we were already in kfaraza okay so at what time did we had teams fighting inside already okay so then what time did this whole thing break inside 6 30.

okay 6 30 in the morning yeah you got there at 9 30.

yeah okay and we have already teams that are fighting inside so we're reserves right we come from home There are teams that are already waiting on base that already went into, I mean, the first team that went in,

four guys died and five got injured fighting.

They were nine.

That's who went in because that's how we had no idea what was going on.

So only nine.

I mean, that was the first call.

Right.

The first call had nine people go in.

And how many terrorists were, you said 500 actually.

So we fought in Berry 500 terrorists.

Yeah.

That's the number that I got.

I don't know.

I haven't counted them.

The number that I received was 500 terrorists.

And we're a group.

We're a small group.

I think you, I think you, how many, okay.

Yeah.

How many were

many numbers very few very few There's very few people in your group, but you got there within three hours of it Okay, so then where is this number of like seven hours it took for people to so that is the massive the large amounts of soldiers that come in platoons and and companies and they come with armored vehicles and tanks.

Yeah, those are the soldiers that that big question is where what happened that it took so long to get there, which is a question that we asked as well.

And what's the answer that you get?

We don't get an answer yet.

Nobody says anything.

The first answer is that there were soldiers outside that didn't get the green light, didn't get the okay from their commanders, the top commanders to go in, which we didn't wait for.

We just went in.

I mean, which is my instinct.

And I'm sure I tell you a situation, the house next to you has, you hear people shooting and you have a gun.

You would go in.

Yeah, I wouldn't wait for somebody to tell me.

So that's what we thought as well.

We just went in.

And the bigger amounts of soldiers waited for an okay from their commander and they didn't get it.

Okay, why, in your opinion, what do you think the reason is?

Like, why do you think so this goes to conspiracy theories?

Because I don't know what to do.

I know what's your theory.

Okay, what is your conspiracy theory?

Okay, I'm going to say something very bad here.

Can I put this on?

Because, I don't know, we'll figure it out.

Okay.

The more the war continues, the more this government stays.

The moment this war ends, they're out.

Today, the numbers are 70% of Israelis across the board, from religious people to non-religious people, right-wing, left-wing, the number is 70%

want new elections.

70% want new elections.

So the moment this war is finished, they're out.

They may win again, that doesn't matter.

But this government is done.

And the more this war continues ongoing, Chizbalah, Hamas, doesn't matter, this government stays on longer.

So the story that they kept on, that the right, the extreme right-wing part of our government kept on telling us is that because of the left wing and because of the protests in Tel Aviv that would happen every week, our enemies saw that we're weak and they attacked us.

That's the story that they're selling.

And that shows you that they're wrong on so many levels.

Our intelligence was wrong.

Our attack forces weren't in place.

The speed of our government of how fast they reacted took days.

I think it took four days for our government to announce that we're in a war.

When our Channel 12 News announced it at 9 a.m.

They announced this is a war.

This isn't around.

This is an operation.

This is a war.

It took our government four days.

I think that's the number.

I mean, it is unbelievable of what has happened in that sense.

Like, do you, and how about the fact that there was all these people from Gaza that were kind of helping Hamas?

They were coming in,

working for Israel,

giving them all this intel.

And days later, we,

after we figured that out, we thought there are for sure like silent squads that are in working zones inside the major cities waiting for the day of command.

That's what we thought.

We know now it's not true, but I mean, it could be true.

That to me is what's unbelievable.

And how about like even the cyber part?

Like no one saw the cyber, like they were in the cyber, in like the Israeli cyber.

And people are saying that Iran trained them.

How didn't we figure that out?

Like, there are so many different ways here.

I mean, it's crazy for me that there wasn't a helicopter in the sky in one second taking down everyone on the border i mean it makes no sense yeah do you do you should have taken one second do you do you think that netanyahu is a corrupt and he was like in cahoots with him so that's extreme uh conspiracy yeah i don't think he's in cahoots with him i do think he made a lot of mistakes in this war a lot of judgmental mistakes that he's done, a lot of war mistakes that he's done, and he won't account for his mistakes.

That's what think.

That's my problem.

Because if he wants to stay in power, right?

Like what most people do when they want to stay in power is they create war, right?

Right.

Because then you're never, your job is secure, basically.

We do it, and people do it all the time until it's done, right?

So, like, people do all sorts of crazy things politically to stay in power.

And so, I mean, I don't think that I don't know if that's true or not true.

I'm just, I'm just throwing out all these different crazy conspiracy theories because I have crazy conspiracy theories as well, which I don't know, but I mean, nothing could be crazier than what is happening.

That's exactly the case.

Nothing could be the answer, it just happened, we missed it, is crazier than the entire government is working with Hamas.

Really?

That's what I'm saying.

It's crazier to take me, especially because within like the across time, people know, like it's like a known thing.

There's nobody, there's no army, there's no intelligence unit smarter, better, stronger, stronger, more in control than us.

That's what we were told.

Right.

And then, like, like, you're thinking, but people also have this idea in their head that, like, Hamas is like fighting with like sticks and stones.

You know what I mean?

They don't realize the amount of money that's been like

billions of dollars.

Billions that's been infused into them where they're buying, of course, they're making rockets and all this other stuff.

Well, they should have been using it for infrastructure or whatever else.

People assume that we're like, the Jewish Israelis are like the big bad wolf, and they're like these little, right, you know, me, these poor guys are like this.

And it's, it's the opposite.

I mean, there are also billions of dollars dollars that went into building the tunnels.

That's where all the money went.

Billions of dollars that went into buying weapons, rockets, guns, ammunition, and billions of dollars to build inside Gaza factories for weapons.

So they also build inside.

People don't know that.

Exactly.

They have factories.

They have factories to build these things.

So why is it that the media, the PR with Israel is so lousy?

So lousy.

And like

so terrible.

Yeah.

where we're that the whole David and Goliath, that we are like the Goliath, and like the truth is, we're actually the opposite, right?

We're like the David.

People forget there are 21 Muslim countries around us, and they people don't even know, forget about forgetting, they don't even know.

And I mean, in the six-day war, Jordan and Egypt denied all the Palestinians from coming in, denied them, they wouldn't let them.

Even more, they, when they attacked us, they told them, leave your houses, come back once we've killed the Jews.

And then, and people forget all this.

So the Palestinian people are Jordanian and they're Egyptian and they're from Lebanon and they're part of 21 Muslim countries around us.

They're not a small group that lived there their entire life.

It's just wrong.

I know.

It's just against the facts.

And yet we're the oppressor, which is, and so how did that story,

how would that even happen?

Like, I felt like over time, it's become even worse with time that we've become, you know, quote unquote, the bad guys.

So, I've heard a story, which I don't know if it's true.

Okay.

And if somebody hears this and can go check it, I'd love that.

Okay.

I heard a story that a law firm in New York was paid with Arab money to change the narrative to make the Arab people in Israel be called the Palestinians and then change it so that they're

the small, poor little David and we're the Goliath, to separate them from the Arab world so that they'll have a better story.

That's what I heard.

Really?

Yeah.

I heard a story similar where

their PR machine was very strategic over years to build out, like to change the, I guess, the narrative to make it very to what you just said, right?

Like, because for many, many years back when, I mean, you're a baby.

How old are you?

Like, six?

Yeah.

How old are you?

Six.

Yeah, six.

You're like such a little, yeah, you're a little baby.

You're 30, right?

Yeah.

Like, I remember many years ago, Israel was considered to be the,

you know, the

kind of the oppressed.

And like, we were kind of like being, we were the ones constantly being picked on, which is actually the accurate story if people actually do their research.

And then over time, especially now with social media and everything else, so much money has been infused with robots, even with online.

And they did, I heard the same story that they hired all the top brains in the world and machines and AI to create a completely different narrative, which has now become the propaganda machine, right?

Right.

So, I mean, they've done also that and also in all the like the big universities, Ivy League, whatever, they bought the curriculum.

They bought the teachers.

They bought the spots.

Yeah.

We put in money and made buildings, like the Jewish people made buildings, but they bought whoever's teaching.

Isn't that exactly true?

Like I was able to.

Oh, yeah, I've read articles about it.

It's completely true.

It's 100%.

Okay, tell us about that.

Talk about it.

Because 100%.

Yeah, a lot of money have come from the Arab world, the big oil money, Qatar, the big oil money.

I think it started, if I'm not mistaken, in the 70s.

That was when it started.

They gave money to the Ivy League, and they gave them two conditions.

One condition was to close the Jewish history studies, close it.

And the second one was that they get to choose the teachers.

And the Ivy League said they won't close it, but they will minimalize the Jewish studies.

And they got to a number that they all agree on and courses and whoever teaches the courses, but they agreed on the teachers that the Arab money can put in their own teachers.

And that's, I'm talking about the 70s.

That's when they started to change the narrative.

So it's been 50 years that they've been working on this to change whatever they learn at school.

And then all the kids just go and learn the wrong narrative.

They forget that the Palestinian people have been created when?

When was the Palestinian flag created?

1964?

So before that, there were Jews and way before that, there were Jews.

And we've been there the entire time.

They forget to tell that every single Arab-Israeli war has been started by Arabs.

It has never been our side that started a war.

We always wanted peace.

They forget to say the 6th of October was a ceasefire.

We've been on ceasefire since 2014, which we never broke, and they've been shooting rockets at us.

The only reason they haven't heard of it is because we have Iron Dome.

So, if we talk about the thousands of rockets that they've been shooting since 2014, and Israel hasn't done anything, hasn't been attacking, people forget to mention that.

And then the 7th of October was just the continuation of thousands of rockets being fired since 2014.

And then they attacked, and then they came in, and they literally left us no option.

No option.

No option.

Okay, so talk about what happened to you.

So then you're acting, doing all your stuff.

It comes up.

I'm preparing for a role that i was supposed to i'm not say where but in a u.s network um i'll tell you later okay that i was preparing for

i already had a job that i was supposed to fly out october 22nd fly out to film three months yeah and so so i'm preparing for that role and i have another uh film that i'm preparing for that it was supposed to film in march and so that's what i have ahead of me and it's october 6th and i'm we're driving me and my girlfriend down south, and she won't tell me where we're going.

I only know it's my birthday party, that's what we're celebrating.

And we're driving down south, and we go into this like glamping site in Ktesh Ramon, in the Ramon crater down south.

Okay, and my entire teammates are there, like my whole team is there waiting for me, and my best friends from home.

When you say team, what do you mean your team?

My team from my unit.

Oh, so you are like literally like best friends with these people.

Yeah, yeah, they're with or with us.

No matter what.

Yeah, yeah, my best friends.

regardless of this seen everything together shed wow blood sweat everything

and we've become best friends and my my friends from home were there as well and she organized this whole event for me and they closed this entire glamping site and brought a barbecue like a guy that did a barbecue for us and djs that had music on for us and that's how we were supposed to spend the entire weekend yeah so this happened on your birthday so that was supposed to be between the 6th of October and the 8th of October, my birthday, my 30th birthday party.

Yeah.

Your life is like very eerie and surreal.

My life is always on the edge.

Yeah.

I never have like a normal situation Monday afternoon.

Never.

I was going to say never on regular Monday.

Yeah.

Wow.

Always in the extreme.

And what's even more surreal is that at the end of my birthday, so we're celebrating all day.

And we, at 11 p.m., they have to shut off the music because we're in this open place.

And that's the law in Israel in these special places.

You have to shut off the music at 11 p.m.

Which was lucky because we'd be partying till the morning.

11 p.m.

We shut off the music.

We sit around like a bonfire and we start like talking.

My entire team and friends and me and we all like bless each other and talk about like what's waiting for us this year.

And everybody is laughing at me that my life is always so extreme.

That was the joke that night.

Yeah, it was crazy.

The joke was your life is always extreme.

Of course, this is your 30th birthday party, the best party ever.

Like, that's what they're saying.

And then we go to sleep.

And on the way to the tent, I take my girlfriend, I kiss her, and I thank her for the best day of my life.

That's how we ended the day.

And then I go to sleep.

And then I wake up and she says, I'm sorry, there's a war.

Check your phone.

That's it.

And I check my phone and I have a message for my commander.

Get to the base.

Everyone now.

I wake up my team.

We get on the cars we start driving down south and she is the last car because she's a journalist she's going down there as well to give the news oh my gosh okay and then so we're driving all of us one after the other she's the last all the way we're on the phone me and her is she israeli too yeah she's israeli i turn to the base she goes down south and she's supposed to go to like a news like outlet or whatever yeah like a news station but in the field Like, not like a closed station, just like something that they put up for when there's a war.

And she goes there, and I go to the base.

And then I get prepared.

We get into the car.

My entire team drives down south.

We're driving like guns out the windows because we understand that everywhere terrorists could be waiting for us.

And a car before us gets jumped by terrorists on the way down south.

We stop the car, get out, take care of the terrorists, get in the car, keep driving.

Hold on a minute.

You were like in the car.

Yeah, we're on the way.

Our our first mission was

and you had a car coming towards you or like in front of you whatever and you saw terrorists there yeah what do you mean what was he doing terrorists attacked a car a terrorist like squad were they on the car like give me this all driving like on the road okay on the way to our mission okay they're driving to a separate mission we're driving driving to kfaraza but we're on the same road down south and a terrorist squad that was hiding in the bushes jumps them starts shooting at them and then we all just get out kill the terrorists.

How did you kill the terrorists?

Shoot them.

But how'd you even have the stuff?

You had all the stuff?

We had everything.

We stopped in the base, got prepared, got on like our army car, and went down south.

Okay, okay, okay.

I didn't realize you had the stuff already.

Okay, sorry.

I was like, just okay, go off.

This is unbelievable.

Got off.

How many terrorists, by the way?

A squad.

So like three or four.

Yeah.

I mean, we didn't even stop to like assess the situation.

We just finished, get in the car, go.

Like it was that.

Yeah.

Did any innocent people get killed?

No.

There weren't any innocent people there because so the a second after that or or before that we got to like the the the blockage of where the police are and the army are they're way there they're stopping any civilians from coming through because they don't want anybody to go into the war zone so we get there we pass that and then just like the entire road was full of of bodies all over And we're driving our car through the bodies, just like that.

And then on the right and to the left of the street.

What car are you driving?

Just your own car?

No, our Army car.

Okay, you're driving the Army car.

The whole team is together.

We're all prepared, guns out, driving down south.

Do you have a bulletproof vesta on you?

Yeah.

But it protects you like.

I was going to say, because it doesn't obviously protect everybody.

Not on your left side.

Yeah.

Or your right side.

It just protects here.

The middle, the back, and like a little bit of the sides.

Yeah.

But not up here.

Okay, go on.

Because I mean, you have to be

agile.

Yeah, agile.

Yeah.

You got to be able to move.

Okay, so then go on.

So are you freaking out right now?

No, we're like focused.

We know what we're going to now.

We're laser focused.

We see cars on the right and on the left like burning with bodies inside.

Yeah, and whatever car wasn't on fire, just bodies like spilling out of the car and all over the road.

So that road today is known as the blood, the blood highway.

So we're driving down that road, just literally going through the bodies.

And I remember the guy driving, driving there was like a terrorist dead on the left like with his head and he and he asked me if i saw it i was like yeah just like what did you i want you to tell me the details like what did you see so his head was off so that terrorist yeah his head was like disconnected from his from his throat and he was just all broken up which we were very happy about because he came in with uh with like a motorcycle with rpgs to shot down cars on the way but civilian bodies of Israeli civilians just on the floor next to me.

How many did you see?

How many did

you say?

Yeah.

50 dead bodies.

50.

Just there.

Yeah.

That we're driving through and that are in the cars on the side of the road.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

So that's how we started.

Like that's the first thing we saw.

And then we keep on driving down south.

The entire time we have rockets falling left and right.

Yeah.

Everything's burning.

Okay.

Yeah.

It just didn't feel like we're in Israel.

It felt like we're, I don't know, in a crazy war zone outside of the world.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can't, it sounds like a movie.

It does sound like a movie.

Yeah.

It was like an extreme action movie.

Really extreme.

But like you couldn't believe this is Israel.

You couldn't understand that.

So how many people are you?

I know you're not, you're like with you in this moment as you're going down this blood, blood road.

How many people are with you?

Okay, and you guys are all just kind of like going through these.

Going through these bodies.

Guns are all out.

Okay.

we're talking to each other like get prepared get your bullets in the chambers whatever everybody be ready to to get out of the car like we're getting each other hyped up and uh until we get to kfaraza okay and then kfaraza is a kibbutz where we get there and everything's on fire everything's just like exploding and you hear the gunshots inside and you hear the fighting inside and What we had to do was get connected to the team that's already fighting for a few hours and get inside and help them and they didn't answer the communication the radio because they were in the middle of fighting and you can't just go in because friendly fire so we had to like just figure out what to do so what we did was we opened up like a medical point outside of the kibbutz so we asked a different team that was there to drive their armored vehicle inside get out the injured people and bring them to us and that's what they did yeah but what if there were terrorists there who were gonna kill them while they're walking out An hour in, a car came racing out.

We shoot down the tires.

We stop the car.

We pull the guy that's driving out of the car.

And he had two girls, two women that he tried to kidnap in the back of his car.

So it was a Hamas terrorist just racing out of the kibbutz with two women tied up in the back.

So we knew there could be a terrorist anywhere.

But we didn't care because we knew that there were civilians injured inside and we had to take care of them.

So that armored car went in, brought out the civilians.

Did you kill that terrorist?

No, so we tied him up and sent him to interrogation.

We need that information at that point, especially because we have no idea what's going on.

How old are these guys that you saw?

So he was about 20 years old.

So these guys are like kids, basically.

They're kids, but we fought guys at around, I'd say most of them were around 30-ish.

That's what it seemed like, 30-ish, a little more, a little less.

So, like, combatants, men that were trained, that were prepared, that had an infinite amount of ammunition on them.

That's what it was.

I saw the amount of ammunition these guys had.

It wasn't a little.

Each one of them brought crazy amounts of ammunition.

Yeah.

I mean, it was mind-boggling.

Yeah.

And you see them, you see the videos.

They go into the kibbutz.

They shoot down the tires of the ambulance so that the ambulance can't move.

They shoot down at the Nova Festival.

I have a friend that was injured there.

She was with me in the hospital.

She was shot in the leg.

They shot an RPG at a moving ambulance with her friend inside, burnt her all up, killed her on spot.

They went to the medical aid tent at the festival, threw grenades inside the medical aid tent.

So they came with...

infinite amount of ammunition with the sole goal to kill as many people as they can.

And it didn't matter if it was old people, young people, or injured people, or doctors, or whatever.

Just kill them.

And also, the people that they were killing are like the most like, they were like peace protesters.

Like they were like the ones like they were like the most believed in the peace and in living next to Gaza.

Can you believe how insane this is?

Like it wasn't anybody shooting themselves in the legs.

The problem is the world isn't looking at like that.

Like these are the people who are kumbaya.

We can all be friends.

We can all live next to Gaza.

Everything's going to be fine.

Don't worry.

And that's who they're killing.

Yeah.

So then, okay, so I mean, we're taking care of civilians.

And the first, like the first person we're taking care of is they open up the armored vehicle, and this mother steps out.

She's hugging her three-year-old daughter, and they're both burnt all the way from head to toe.

Her daughter is screaming, and the mother has like a piece of shrapnel in between her eyes with blood all the way down her face, holding her daughter.

A terrorist just shot an RPG in their house.

That's the Tamas' enemies.

That's who they're killing.

That three-year-old girl.

So her mother saved her life.

She ran into her room, which was on fire, pulled the little girl out, came out to us.

We had to separate them and give them each like the medical attention.

And then from there on, it was just like a guy came out with his leg cut off, and you see this guy that his life is over.

That's it.

And another guy who was dying in our hands with his stomach just wide open.

Yeah,

absolutely.

He was, I don't know if he was cut or shot or whatever, but his stomach is wide open and he's dying next to us.

You can see it.

You can feel him dying.

And they're shooting rockets at us and we're lying down on them to protect them and then keep on giving them medical attention.

And all the time we hear our team, our second team that won't answer the communication fighting inside.

Just, and you hear them shooting RPGs at them and everything.

Okay, so then what happens?

So we're there.

How many hours are we talking?

Yeah.

What number?

So that was like two, three hours.

Okay.

Taking care of just injured civilians and soldiers.

And we're, I mean, we're taking care of

civilians and injured people here.

And on the left side of the street, we're just piling up bodies that come out.

That's what we're doing for three hours, just piling them up one after the other.

Civilian, soldiers, whatever, whatever came.

Yeah.

And then we finish that and we get called from our unit to tell us that you've got to get to Kibutzberi as fast as possible.

Leave what you're doing, get to Kibutzberi.

So what we did was we left one team there at Kibfaraza and the team that I was in, we drove to Beri.

How far are the two?

A few minutes' drive.

Oh, okay.

Just a few minutes.

And so we leave Kibbutz Kfaraza, we get on our cars, we start driving.

We get to Kibutz Beri where

we just, like,

here we didn't wait for any orders.

We just went in.

straightforward and what we did was me and like my partner in battle so david so we went in straight to a team that was fighting inside.

And my team just went around the kibbutz, like flanked them to get to the other side to meet us in the middle so that we can cover as much ground as possible.

So that's what we did.

Me and David went in and we met a different team that was there fighting already from the morning.

I get out of the armored vehicle next to them and we put in our friend who's dying, who's bleeding out.

That's how I entered the battle.

And then I'm in the battle and my commander says to me, okay, we have, you see that playground?

There are terrorists in the back of the playground.

And we're shooting like over a blue slide and I'm jumping over like a seesaw.

Yeah.

And we're fighting in a kids' playground.

That's like the first battle in Kibutzuberi.

And while we're doing that, there's another terrorist squad fighting us from the left, from these garbage cans that were there.

And another terrorist squad from the back fighting whoever's in back.

So how did you not get killed?

Like, how did you not get shot and burned?

And because we're good fighters.

But like,

there's so many of them.

And like, you don't know where they're coming from.

Yeah.

So you're always fighting.

Like, what was in our mind was we're fighting at 360 degrees at all time.

That's what we understood.

That's what we realized pretty fast.

And you see a window, there's a gun on it.

You see a door, you have a gun on it.

Like, there's no weak points.

You can't afford having a weak point.

And so we would just like fight at all times at 360.

And if we're outside fighting, like in this situation, you finish the fight as fast as possible and get to a house, clear out the house, which means you're fighting inside, killing a terrorist or terrorist squad, and then saving the family that's in the room, in the safe room.

You do that.

You get the family out of the house.

You bring an armored car.

You get the family in the armored car and you send them out of the kibbutz.

And then you're in the safe house.

You regroup.

You put new ammunition in.

You drink water.

Kind of see everybody's doing all right.

nobody's hurt.

All right, next house.

So that was the mission.

And you just moved from house to house.

But like, how do you even have a second?

There's so many terrorists there to do.

There's no second.

There's no anything.

I mean, so we're fighting a terrorist there.

And so we're in the house now and we regroup.

And then there's a terrorist in a window in front of us.

And we have three gunmans.

I'm one of them.

We're shooting him.

And our commanders in back of us are.

are already preparing the next thing.

So you have no, there is no second.

They're preparing.

All right, the next next house you finish good go i mean and also like you have no like no matter how much training you have you've never i can't you've never done anything like this before this is just all like in theory you're practicing so i mean i've done battle and i've done close counter battle and everything but not like this not like this no and not with the amount of hostages that was the like the biggest disadvantage that we had.

Yeah.

Because I mean, if it was 20 soldiers against 500 terrorists and I could do anything I wanted to do, I could throw a grenade in each house, game over.

We'd destroy them.

I don't care how many they are.

But because every time I enter a house, I have a family that's a hostage inside that house.

I can't shoot my gun until I don't see the terrorists.

I can't throw a grenade in.

I can't shoot a missile into the house because I have a hostage inside the house.

So that was our biggest disadvantage.

And they knew it.

And they knew it.

And they worked.

Exactly.

They knew that you weren't going to do that.

Right.

They knew it.

it so they would wait for us wait behind the terra the the family or wait next next to the family or a door next to them so that we would have that disadvantage which we would still beat them all day we still managed to beat them how so instead of going in the in the door we went through the windows okay so then what so then so go on so then you're doing all this right you're taking so we're going we're clearing houses all day that's what we're doing for hours and i mean nobody's looking at their phone nobody's looking at their watch we're just fighting Aren't you scared?

No.

It's a question I'm being asked a lot.

You're not scared because, first of all, we're very well prepared, very well trained.

And also, to see a family of hostages with your eyes and then literally stand between them and terrorists gives you so much power and such a strong position to be in because I'm not going to let them get through.

no matter what because they're behind me because that family's behind me so fear was like out of the window.

Nobody cared.

We were there to fight.

And the adrenaline, I'm sure, because like you had a job to do.

Yeah.

Okay.

And then like, so what happens now?

So we're fighting all day.

We're clearing houses.

We're seeing really the most horrific things from entire families that were burnt and just bodies left out of the houses to die.

An entire family that a terrorist, like what they did was the family was, they put the parents on top and then two siblings and then two younger siblings.

and terrorists just like shot them all in a pile and left the four bodies there.

The two youngest siblings that were on the bottom managed to run out, so we see just a pile of bodies in between houses.

And then, so that was the entire day, just going through houses, saving the hostages that we can save, killing the host, the terrorists that were there, and just getting to as many houses as we can.

That was that was that day until about so it was 7 p.m.

So it was already after sundown, so it was pretty dark out.

And our mission now was to get to like the big hostage situation that was in the kibbutz.

We didn't know how many hostages there were.

This is all big hostage situations.

So the big hostage situation was there was a rumor that day, the dining room of kibbutz Berry

had 50 hostages inside.

And we heard that and that became our mission to get there.

They were hiding in there?

No.

Hostages.

Yeah, no, the hostages were like holding 50 hostages.

Why would they be hold on a second?

So yeah, I didn't know.

So this is the rumor.

So it was just a rumor, and I'll clear it up now.

So the intelligence we get is the dining room of Kibbutz Berry.

So it's a kibbutz, so they all eat together in like a big dining room.

So there's a dining room.

The rumor is the terrorists took 50 people from different families, put them in the dining room, and are holding them hostage now.

So that's 50 people.

So that's like the big hostage situation.

The reality of it was that there was a woman named Pesi Kohen.

That's her name.

She took in survivors from the party, from the Nova Festival and fed them at her house.

14 survivors.

And the terrorists came in there and saw just a table full of food and called it the dining room between themselves.

And that's the information we got.

That's the intelligence we got.

So they called it the dining room.

So we were on our way to that house, 14 hostages.

Then we thought it was 50.

Today we know it was 14.

Two survived.

That's it.

So two?

Two.

Yeah, two women.

That's it.

They killed everybody else.

They killed everybody else.

Yeah.

And why do those two survival?

How did they survive?

I don't know.

So, so I didn't get there, sadly, but we were on our way.

And we had one house left until we get.

to that house.

And I'm leading my team.

And David, my partner in battle, so he's next to me.

He's number two.

And we get out of that last house, and I'm on my way to the house before the big hostage situation.

And I'm about 10-15 yards from the door, which until now, what I did was you get to a door, you smash in the door, and you start fighting whoever's fighting or saving whoever needs to be saved.

And I'm about 15 yards, 10 yards from the door.

And a terrorist takes his gun out of a window from the right side and shoots around.

He misses, but he gets one bullet through my my trigger finger, which is a little shorter now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he gets it through my trigger finger.

I manage to just switch fingers and then me and David attack him, kill that terrorist.

And then I get back to the door and I'm running towards the door because I realize, okay, there are terrorists inside.

There are probably hostages.

I got to get there as fast as possible.

So I'm running to the door.

And then when I get to the step of the door, a terrorist takes out his gun from the window right next to me and shoots a full round at me and David, which a round of an AK-47 is 100 bullets in 10 seconds.

So it's an aggressive gun.

Yeah.

So he shoots a round at us, hits us both.

We both fall, which I'll tell you a crazy piece of information that I find out found out this week.

I found out on Sunday or Monday.

We both fall and I look under the house and I see that there's like an opening.

So I push David in and I go in myself and I turn around and just aim my gun towards the stairs of the door.

So So I'm laying there aiming my gun because, in my mind, a terrorist is going to come out and throw a grenade or shoot at me.

So I'm prepared to shoot at him first.

So I know if I see feet coming at me, I'm shooting.

So, and then I look back and there's like another opening behind me.

And I feel like, okay, he's going to, there are, so they're going to come in back of me.

So I take like my Glock out of my leg and I put it here.

And I see that I can get to back here.

So I'm like, okay, I got this under control.

I feel pretty protected where I am.

And my team is continuing fighting in like, I don't know, where we came from.

So they went back to the house and they're now battling the terrorists that are coming at them, just closing in on them.

So they're fighting their fight.

Me and David are under the house.

with my gun.

I'm looking at those stairs.

I'm looking back.

I'm ready for what's going to happen.

And then just time goes by.

I take my radio out.

I tell my team that I'm injured and David is next to me injured.

We're under the house.

They say, okay, we're coming to get you.

They prepare for like a rescue mission.

They come out and then they get shot down as well.

Three soldiers get shot down.

One guy gets a bullet in his leg.

Another one, a bullet in his throat, which luckily hit nothing important.

He's fine now, totally fine.

And another one that had two bullets in his legs, two bullets in his arms, and a bullet that stopped right between his helmet and his head.

Just stopped.

He told me after that he fell.

The first thing that went through his mind was, I told my wife, I'm not going to die.

That's what he said.

No way.

Yeah.

So they got shot down.

They got pulled back to the medical point.

And I hear that on my radio and I know that that's it.

Game over.

Like me and David are stuck.

And time keeps going by.

And I tell David that it's time to check our wounds.

Why?

Why did you think of that then?

Because I have to re, because I felt if I have a bullet in my leg, I could close it up and deal with it and not die.

I had to know what my situation was, just my medical situation.

So I feel my legs, I'm fine, my stomach, I'm fine, my head, I have blood around my eyes, but I'm fine.

And I have just like a piercing pain.

all through my left side, which I can't move because of it.

And I realize there's no option but to start checking it.

So

I put my hand here and I feel just like a bullet hole in my chest and like the side of my chest.

So the bulletproof vest ends here.

It like kind of does this slanted ending.

So right there, I have a bullet through my chest.

I have two bullets in my vest, in my protected, like the ceramic protected vest.

So that saved you, the bulletproof.

Two bullets saved me.

Yeah.

A bullet here, which I feel, and I feel I'm losing blood from it.

And I feel my, just my breath.

I'm losing my breath, which means my lung is punctured and probably filling up with blood.

And my arm is just, I can't feel it, but I'm just, I'm so much pain here.

So I move my arm just to feel what's going on.

And all I could feel is like an opening, just wide open.

Yeah.

And I kind of touch it and I could feel just like the inside of my arm.

And I'm losing a lot of blood.

I can just feel the blood coming out through my shirt like because I'm on my right side and it's like spraying out on my face.

So

I realize

that it's just a matter of time.

Like it's just, I just have a few minutes.

And I asked David what's up with him and he tells me he has a bullet in his stomach and a bullet in his chest and three bullets in his arm.

And we're both losing blood.

very fast.

And we can't move.

And I realize also that the only thing that's keeping my lung from totally collapsing is my equipment so if i move and it loosens up it'll let all the blood in so i can't move at all and david can't move as well so we're just waiting there waiting to be attacked from a terrorist and i'm talking to my team the whole time on the radio and they're in battle they're fighting terrorists that are just closing in on them and they're trying to get to us but they can't and they're fighting and they can't and then about i don't know 45 minutes in you're still alive after 45 minutes.

So, I'm like, I'm losing it, coming back, losing it, coming back.

I feel my arm like

just letting go of my gun, and I wake up and I'm like, no, I have to hold my gun.

Like, I have to hold my gun.

And David, too.

And David's next to me, yeah.

And he's doing the same thing.

And he's doing the same thing.

And we're just both trying to be focused as much as we can, but we know that, like, just a matter of time until this is it.

Yeah.

What were you thinking?

So, so I was thinking only of two things.

First one was of surviving.

That's what was in my head, survival.

And as cliche as it is,

I was thinking about my girlfriend and that I should have married her and that I should have brought kids with her and I didn't.

And I felt like I just I messed up.

And I felt if I did one thing wrong in life, it was not marrying her already and not having a kid with her.

How long have you guys been dating at this point?

Two years.

Two years.

Yeah.

Wow.

Almost two years.

And you were thinking about that.

That's it.

Nothing else.

Couldn't think of anything else.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

I'm going to cry.

Okay.

So then what happened?

So 45 minutes go by, and then suddenly a guy comes on my radio and tells me that he's coming in with a tank.

And I was like, I couldn't understand what he said.

And I didn't get what he meant.

And he said, listen, I'm coming in with a tank.

Now, I later learned that this guy gets to the kibbutz a little after us, sees a tank, gets in the tank with the tank like team, just goes in without waiting for any command, no green light, just went in, killed tens of terrorists.

Who's this guy?

This guy from my unit.

And he's a hero.

And he basically just said, he just

said.

He said, I have to save everybody in this kibbutz.

I'm going in with a tank.

He's never been in a tank in his life before this.

Yeah.

And he went and shot.

He took the team.

He's like, get in the tank, turn it on we're going in i'm your new commander just walked in started driving people should do that all the time right why don't they because he he i don't know he thought about it i don't know okay go ahead so

he comes i hear the tank coming in and just parking in front of the house and then i hear all the guns like moving towards the tank towards the house and then they start working on a plan how So he can't shoot inside because there may be hostages inside.

So he can only shoot at the walls.

So that the idea was to shoot at the walls next to the windows to kind of scare the terrorists, get them down.

And then when they're down, my team will flank the tank and come get me.

And they executed it to perfection.

Perfection.

Yeah.

And he was shooting at the wall.

And every time he kind of like injured the wall, he moved so that no bullet would go in so that he doesn't kill any hostages, which is how important it was for us not not to kill hostages and not to injure anyone.

So, and then my team flanks me and comes and crawls down and just gets to me and David and pulls us out.

And I remember them looking at me and saying, You're going to be okay.

And then at that point, I said to one of the guys, I lost my arm.

So, just forget about it.

And then he like just found my arm in back of me, connected just by like skin and I don't know a few blood vessels left your arm was detached all bones were shattered so nothing is holding it together muscles ripped all of them nerve system cut off so nothing's holding my my arm like my I don't know if you can see the

yeah so it was open the entire way up through here So it's just wide open in the back, all shattered, all broken up, nothing left.

And he saved your arm.

And he pulled my arm back, tied it to my vest, to my equipment, just and got me out of there and saved my arm.

Yeah.

And then they took us to the first medical point where what they do there is they just cut off your, like your clothes to see that you aren't injured anywhere else.

At that point, I tell them, listen, my phone is

in my left pocket.

Put it in my underwear because I got to call Adva, advise my girlfriend.

I got to call her and tell her I'm fine, which I'm not.

I'm like almost dead.

And they do it.

They listen to me.

They get me out of the kibbutz to the second medical point.

And

right before I get to the helicopter, I pull out, my friend pulls out my phone and he asks me if to call her and I tell him to call her.

He calls her up and she's an investigative journalist.

So all day she was at the Nova Festival saving lives.

So she went in with her car, drove, searched for kids, like left her news station, abandoned her news station, drove her personal private car in the fields, pulled kids out of the bushes and saved their lives.

That's what she did all day.

And brought them to the medical points.

And brought them back to the medical points.

How many kids did she do that?

Hundreds of kids.

Her and another guy just drove around saving people's lives.

She was the first person at the Nova Festival, before the army, before police, before everyone.

She was the first one that saw what was going on there.

Yeah.

and and there were still i mean she was saving people when terrorists are shooting at the on the other side so she's risking her life this amazing investigative journalist that shouldn't be risking her life to save these kids so as there were terrorists as i'm battling terrorists in the kibbutz next to her she's saving kids that are running away from terrorists that are a few hundred like yards from her shooting at people.

So that's what she's doing all day.

And then you're making it sound like she went to get like a, you know, a quart of milk from the supermarket.

So

she's doing this all day.

Like that's crazy.

She's doing, yeah.

Just saving people's lives all day.

And like, and reporting it back and just running around and pulling kids out of the bushes.

And there was actually terrorists around there, too.

Yeah.

Terrorist shooting right next to her.

And she's driving her car.

How did she get, how did she survive?

I don't know.

I have no idea how she survived.

Just, yeah.

And it's all on the news.

Like, it was all live on the news.

And her cameraman is running after her and she's just like pulling people out of the bushes, like screaming her name out.

It's me, it's me.

It's okay, come out.

Is she totally traumatized?

So we're not there yet.

Yeah, because you're still in it.

We're still in it.

Yeah.

But she has seen the most horrific things that people talk about.

She's seen it all.

The party was a massacre, and she was the first one there before they did anything, took out any bodies, gave anyone any medical aid.

She was the first one there.

So she saw all of it.

It all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's like, I guess you're still,

you're like in shock at this point still.

Right.

So she's there all day and I'm fighting, like battling all day.

And we don't talk at all.

And then like our last phone call was, I don't know, eight in the morning, like talking when we split on the road.

That's our last phone call.

Now we haven't talked all day.

She's getting ready for like the main broadcast of the night.

And she takes out her phone, sees I haven't called, calls her dad.

Her dad says

haven't heard of him all day, haven't heard from him.

And then she's like a minute before live broadcast, her phone rings, it's my name on the screen.

And then she says in her mind, oh, okay, great.

He's fine.

I won't answer the phone.

Puts it in her pocket.

And then she thinks again, she says, you know what?

I'll answer the phone.

Maybe it'll be the last time we talk in a while.

She answers the phone and she answers.

She says,

She says, honey, I'm 30 seconds before broadcast.

Is it urgent?

That's how she answers the phone.

Is it urgent?

Is it urgent?

And I'm like, you know what?

Well, I'm going to die.

So, what I say to her is, listen, I say, I'm okay.

Go back to work.

I got shot in my chest.

I'll see you at home.

I'm on my way to the hospital.

And then at that point, she realizes that, like, my head is like probably, I'm exploded with adrenaline.

I'm out, like, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

And my teammate tells her, like, I'm in bad condition.

And she goes on live television, does the broadcast, comes to meet me at the hospital.

And at the hospital, I mean, they had, it was 600 surgeries in three hours.

So

they told her, we're not going to get to his arm.

He lost his arm.

And then she brought an ambulance and put me on the ambulance.

Brave decision, like last second decision, sent me to the hospital in Tel Aviv where they saved me.

So in that place where they were not going to touch your arm?

So they had so many

injured soldiers and civilians that they first were saving lives.

Yeah.

And then we'll get to the rest.

So they like

stabilize me.

How did they stabilize you then?

So they close up the wound,

which I was losing so much blood from.

They close up my arm and they start giving me blood and plasma and everything they can washing my wounds whatever they can do and then close me up and just wait for the operation and you're like she's like no way i'm gonna go she says no way yeah no way gets ambulance signs all forms she needs to sign gets me out of there drives like and they saved your arm and they save yeah saved my arm it could move it could work yeah even after so many hours like what what was did they tell you if they waited any longer or would they did they give you any kind of yeah if i would stay there, I would for sure lose it.

And if I wouldn't go straight into surgery, I'd lose my arm.

Like right away.

And how long, if they didn't catch you when they caught you and got you, how long did you have to live?

I was supposed to die 50 minutes before that.

5-0.

5-0.

I was supposed to die seven minutes after I was shot because of my wounds.

Because of losing my lung, blood going in my lung, losing blood, about seven minutes.

But you survived.

David, next to me, was supposed to survive five minutes.

Yeah.

And then we get sent to the helicopter.

We get, we fly out, and then I wake up three days later.

I wake up every day, but I don't remember it.

I wake up three days later.

That's when what I start remembering.

I call my commander and ask him what's up with David.

And he says, just take care of yourself.

Forget about it.

And then I knew something

bad is happening.

And then somebody came to the hospital, told me that David died in the helicopter.

Yeah.

So he died in the helicopter.

Yeah.

Because his whole stomach was basically ripped open.

Yeah.

Wow.

And that was your number two.

That was your best friend.

That was number two.

I've known him for 11 years.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

And he, I mean, he was

newly married, two years, had a seven-month-old child, Shakid, beautiful child who looks exactly like him.

Exactly like him.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And so now what?

Like, what do you do now?

Do you kind of go on with your life?

Like, are you

like, what happens?

Like, how long until this is healed?

Like, what?

So this is already starting to heal.

Okay.

So what they did was they just like opened up different nerves and went.

Can I see the whole thing?

Do you mind if I see it?

I can open up the entire way, but it's like,

I don't know if you can see it.

Will it be fully functioning again?

Are you now out like you're never going to fight again, right?

Oh, I am.

The second I can hold a gun again, I'm back in.

How?

I'll be able to hold a gun again.

But I know you don't think you're traumatized, but aren't you kind of traumatized?

Like, I know you're not yet, but you're not scared again.

Don't think like, I think everybody in Israel is traumatized.

7th of October, before 7th of October, everybody goes through trauma.

And

I mean, we still have to fight.

We still have to.

But what about like, so how does this work?

Like, you know, you come here to LA, you know, you have all these meetings.

You're going to be a

stop.

What happened was I was in the hospital for a month and a half, watching the news every day.

My team still fighting, my brother fighting, brother-in-law fighting.

Everybody I know is fighting.

Were you ever in Gaza, by the way?

Yeah.

You were.

Yeah.

2014.

You were in Gaza.

Yeah.

So you kind of like now, because of the injury, you're just basically healing.

You can't do anything.

So I can't do anything.

Right.

And I was going literally insane in the hospital.

And I saw what was happening in social media and I was watching CNN and BBC.

I couldn't believe what they're telling the world.

I couldn't believe because I was there.

I saw it.

I know what I'm fighting.

And I felt like I couldn't sit aside and

watch these lies just continue going around.

So I...

What were the biggest lies that you saw that really disturbed you the most?

First of all, I can't hear people saying apartheid state.

I can't.

I mean, I I live in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, which is an Arab city right next to Tel Aviv.

Today in the Tel Av University, Palestinian students that study and learn in our university vandalized photos of hostages.

So in an apartheid state, they'd be, I don't know, killed or thrown out or whatever.

Not in Israel.

In Israel,

my doctors were Arab.

Some of my surgeons were Arab.

That's not an apartheid.

Who saved you?

So my the

surgeons

performed different, yeah, different surgeries on me or doctors or nurses that were there.

On, I mean, Muhanid was one of my best nurses, an Arab 31-year-old guy, great guy, studied in Tel Aviv University.

What would he say?

What does he say about all of this?

So we never got into it.

You didn't?

No.

He saw me in a really, so we met

when I went back into operations.

And I was,

I was not happy about that.

So we didn't get into any hard conversations.

Which is too bad.

That's too bad, actually.

Okay, so then you're watching all that.

What was the worst thing that you saw that CNN, BBC, whatever you're

watching?

I mean, you're probably like, oh my God, this interview.

Actually, I have no idea what time it is.

So don't even tell me.

Okay, I don't want.

I'm not going to tell you.

What's so interesting about talking to you is that I've spent, you know, this podcast is not typically a podcast about, you know, Israel war, Hamas, like at all.

It's about like how to be the most productive, like, what are your habits to be the best version of yourself, how to optimize your life, practical things, right?

But because of what's happening, I've kind of taken it upon myself to kind of bring awareness to the world of what is really going on in Israel and like what's happening.

So I've had, you know, I had Nate, you know, Nate Buzz on, I've had the son of Hamas on, I've had Elon Levy, all these people I was telling you, like, I've been doing this a little bit.

And what's so interesting about you and why I find this so riveting is that you actually like were physically there doing it, like fighting in the war, like in the kabuts, like you're an injured soldier.

I mean, your perspective is so unique and different and real, authentic.

I mean, you can't get any more real and authentic than this.

And that's why I'm like, I'm sitting here like basically like holding on to every last word, like on bated breath.

Like, and then what?

Cause it, it, you know, i hate to laugh about it but it does sound like it sounds like an action movie it sounds like i'm listening to like another terminator 4 or like mission impossible movie like it does pitch of the movie yeah like and then this is scene five this is what happens right like and you are an actor and so and you're actually again art imitating life life imitating art like and then you are definitely become a movie i'm sure

what oh there'll be many movies about it and the fact that you played this exact character in a movie three years prior to this and you are here as an actor and you probably will be in a movie about this like it could be your life yet again right like this is just like the whole situation is so riveting you know it's just you know i'm just like i'm just really it's just fascinating and that's why this is like i don't mean this is like going on and on and on it's like you'll be here tomorrow morning

exactly i feel like you're in like your tactical training for the special forces.

Survival week.

Come back and survive.

Survival week.

You know, a final, and one more funny thing.

You know, the son of Hamas guy, Musab, he says to me at the end of my interview, he says to me, you know, I feel like this was very similar to like the is when they when Israel interrogated me, like, because you know, he was a double-lane judge, you know what I mean?

Because he was also here for many hours because he was riveting too, right?

Right?

Because he's talking about being Catholic.

He's amazing.

Amazing.

And he was the son of La Hamas' leader.

So he grew up with him.

Like, to me, people who...

I read his books.

He's unbelievable.

Fascinating.

Was it?

Son of Hamas.

Yeah, but his name in the movie, the movie that his son of Hamas, they called him something, the Green Prince.

Right, the Green Prince.

The Green Prince.

But what to me is the most fascinating people to talk to are people who are in the weeds doing it.

Not just authorities or people who've read books, but you're doing it, living it like him.

I mean, this is where people should get their information from.

And this is not biased.

This is your experience.

Well, it could be biased, I guess, a little bit, but this is actually your experience.

Like, you're not making this stuff up.

This isn't even my opinion.

Yeah, it's not even your opinion.

But I saw and did, and yeah.

And you have the wounds to show it and prove it.

So then here you are, you're in the hospital.

Oh, I think what drove me crazy was the Al-Sharia hospital when they shot the missile.

And I was watching that and I knew that there's no, first of all, 30% 30% of their missiles fall in Gaza nobody knows that 30%

30%

of their missiles fall inside of Gaza and kill their own people and kill their own people that drove me crazy it drove me crazy that after an Israeli attack they know the numbers like that how they don't how the hell no they come out with numbers but they're wrong they make them up of course they make them all up out of all the people that have died zero are terrorists that's an amazing really amazing statistic they're all women and children and really peaceful people it drove me crazy in gaza i've seen with my own eyes ammunition and weapons and missiles inside schools and playgrounds and hospitals in my own eyes i'm not talking about videos that's what i saw in 2014.

so of course that's what i'm seeing that's what's happening now and i i saw all those things that for me were so obvious that the world knows that billions of dollars dollars have gone into terror, into Hamas, and everybody is just looking away and talking about, oh,

Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon.

A week before the Al-Sharia hospital incident, Hamas fired a missile at Barzilay Hospital in Ashkelon.

No, no CNN, BBC,

any news report, nobody talked about it.

about Hamas shooting missiles at a hospital.

But it was such a big deal when they thought that Israel did it.

And then it came out that Hamas did it which they didn't even it took a while for them to apologize It took a long time for the New York

all the news all the news outlet look at how about the UN and Red Cross like why isn't the Red Cross going in and saving these people I mean why aren't they getting so today I read that the deal was for the hostages to get medicine for each box of medicine that the Israeli hostages get Palestinians get a thousand why is the deal not just give them whatever medicine they need?

Why is, are you serious?

That was the deal that Qatar negotiated.

One box of medicine for Israeli hostages, a thousand for Palestinians.

Why?

No, I don't know.

Why aren't Israeli hostages getting whatever medicine they need?

Why is there a baby celebrating today is his one-year-old birthday.

I know.

It's his one-year birthday.

The truth of the matter is, the chances of that sweet baby being alive.

I know.

I mean, that's the thing that, and like, what I'm so worried about is that the longer this goes on, we're losing the fight because people are just seeing the numbers climb in the war and they're forgetting why this war even happened in the first place, right?

Yeah.

And they're forgetting about, oh, we have 150 hostages still there, and that's why I'm still wearing this sweatshirt because it's about like, oh, well, we're killing innocent people, but we wouldn't be having to kill innocent people at all if they just like let the hostages go.

Right.

So it's important to say we're not killing innocent people.

There are casualties which are part of a war.

Of course.

Right, I know.

Just saying there are casualties which are part of the war, which also, this is the lowest amount of casualties, not in the history of Arab and Israeli wars, in the history of wars.

I've gone back and checked it since the 1800s.

This is the lowest amount of casualties ever.

Nobody's talking about that.

Why not?

I know.

Why is nobody talking about that?

Nobody's talking.

The government is saying the ratio is one to one.

one terrorist to one casualty.

That's also the lowest ratio ever.

Nobody's talking about that.

I know.

And we're looked at as like villains when we're like when because of time, people can rewrite history the longer time goes by

and say whatever they like and like even like regurgitate things that they heard that are not factual.

And that's what's really, really scary.

And like nobody's talking about like, why are we even having to give medicine to the hostages?

We should just let those hosts like why are those hostages even having to let the babies out let the hostages out why do we have to negotiate for medicine it's insane and nobody in america and i say america like all of like nobody is like talking about letting these like besides the same six people over and over again like nobody's saying like why are they like allowing these hosts like why are they why is it okay to have hostages these people who are going around being like you know pro-Palestine, like, you know, ceasefire, ceasefire.

No one's saying, let the hostages go.

Let the hostages go and then we'll talk about it.

Nobody's saying it.

And then we're the bad guys.

I don't, I'm, I'm just perplexed by how this is like unfolding daily.

I don't understand.

It really is insane.

And all the rape stories are just unbelievable.

I've heard the

eyewitnesses stories that are just

like really, you can't believe what people have seen.

And everybody's shutting up.

No one's saying a word.

No one's saying a word.

But what's interesting also is people are thinking because the hostages come back from their, you you know, the ones who were released and they're like, they look okay.

They don't look like they're tormented that much.

They don't look like their, their stories aren't like they're like, oh yeah, like, you know, they didn't feed me.

They had, they only gave me bread.

They're not, they're not like saying heroically.

So Hamas are trained, are trained for this.

So I'll tell you what, it's, there, there are two options.

Either they tell them, if you talk about whatever happened, we'll kill.

Of course, that's what, but no one's even, that's obvious.

It's obvious.

and I believe the people that have gone through the worst that's why they're not releasing them the people that have been tortured the women that have been raped the women that may be pregnant they're not releasing them because then we'll have more evidence we'll have more things to talk about more things to show they prefer those people to be dead like they prefer for us to think that they're dead than for us to know they raped them That's how extreme we got.

That's how crazy it is.

I think that's 100% accurate.

And like, so the ones that they, like, is it just like luck of the draw?

Like, the ones who they let out, they were in the homes.

Like, it was so, it's so random.

Like, some of them are in homes, some of them are in tunnels.

You don't know.

It feels like Hamas lost control and people took and hid hostages and they lost all control of where the hostages are.

How is that possible?

They lost control to who?

To the regular civilians?

To the jihad.

To the jihad that are also there.

Or to regular crime families that are in Gaza.

Do Do you think that why they only release

the amount that they release and are not seeming to release anymore is because they are actually all dead?

What is the likelihood?

For sure they're dead or they're very hurt or they're trying to give them medical support so that they look better when they come out to the world.

It can't be that the Bivas babies are just fine

and they won't let them out.

Can't be.

No, there's no way.

And other kids that are still there and other women that are still there, and older people are still there.

There's no way that, and I mean, this week they've been sending out videos to play with our minds.

I know.

Yeah.

That's the problem.

And then, but yet, nobody seems to care.

Nobody seems to care.

This is the thing also.

People are now desensitized.

They've seen such horrific videos.

Like, you can't see any worse than like babies burned to death, which is another thing.

Like, Hamas had a GoPro.

They had GoPros on their freaking heads.

They took the video of them putting a baby in an oven.

And yet people still don't believe it.

People think it's fake.

They took the video.

Mind-boggling.

Okay.

Yet, at the same time, nobody said, because people have seen such horrific things, people become desensitized.

They feel like I'm telling you this when you're telling me your story.

It's so terrible, I think that your brain goes to, it's a movie.

It's not real.

Like, people don't realize.

There's no way this can be real.

Yeah.

Or like they don't exactly like, okay, so I saw a baby burnt.

That's not real.

That wasn't a real thing.

So, like, when you become so desensitized, like, nothing you see after that is affecting you anymore.

Nothing affects them.

And that's, and like, to me, that's why, like, why I stopped posting.

Like, I was posting incessantly because I'm like, people have to know what's going on.

I realized that wasn't really doing a damn thing.

It was like, yeah, it helps for a while.

Yeah.

Showing some people who otherwise wouldn't know.

No, no.

But, like, people don't care anymore.

It's like, okay, they're back to like business as usual.

What I'm trying to post now is

showing how

I have Muslim friends.

It's not about Islam.

It's about radical Islam.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's a big difference.

And that's what I'm trying to show, how radical Islam is taking the world to terrible places.

How I was in New York a few weeks ago speaking at different events, and there's violence all over the

streets.

Unbelievable.

They're walking around with swastikas.

A swastika is not a thing that you're supposed to be walking around with.

I mean, if somebody will walk around with a KKK costume, I'm sure they'll be in a lot of trouble.

So, why can somebody walk around with a swastika and protest in the streets and be and tear down the Rockefeller tree and tear down and break into Jewish-owned stores?

I mean, and that's where the radical Islam is going.

Sharia laws are not just Muslim laws that you should maybe be open to.

Women will not be allowed to vote.

You're allowed to rape your wife in Sharia law.

Whoever's not, who doesn't abide to Muslim laws can be executed.

I mean, these are not laws that you want in London, which they're talking about.

How about the whole LGBTQ system?

Don't even get me started.

Don't get me that.

Really, the best thing I saw was LGBTQ for Palestine is like chickens for KFC.

That's the best thing I saw.

I've never seen that one.

Really?

You've never seen that one?

I've seen it.

Mellions.

I haven't seen that one.

It's the best one I saw.

It's so stupid that I really, I'd love for somebody to speak to me somebody from the lgbt community explain how the hell they can support palestine or hamas or gaza or islam or anything that shows you that they should all be killed in that religion it's a they would walk they'll put their toe in there and they would be

cut off

right off nothing

Walk in, a male walks in wearing a dress dead on the spot.

On the spot, and then thrown off a roof to show that.

Right.

To show everybody, thrown off there.

And yet, yet, people, like, this is the ludicy of what's going on.

I mean, I can go on forever.

And this is why, this is why I've become so enraged by this.

It's like the pure ludicy, the craziness, the outlandish,

like, it just shows you where we are in a society right now to me.

But so then you're sitting here, you're looking at all this stuff, and you're like, I'm going to go to New York.

Like, how did you end up here?

Right.

So, I was going crazy in the hospital, seeing how all the lies that are uh going on in all the media and social media different platforms and i i was my entire everybody i know was fighting and i just couldn't sit in the hospital anymore and i i heard through a different friend who was organizing an event in new york heard about the event asked her if i could speak in the event she said yes we talked about bringing anat david's wife David who died next year.

Yes, yes.

So we flew out together to New York, spoke there together.

And then since then, I've been called out just to come to different places and speak to different communities, different schools.

I'm going to Berkeley next week.

You're going to Berkeley?

I'm going to Penn on March to speak there.

I'm working on getting into Harvard.

So I'm just as many places that I can talk about.

I'm not even talking about my opinion.

I'm talking about my experience, what I've seen with my own eyes.

You can hate me for being a Jew, but you can't say that what I've seen is a lie.

You just can't.

And And I'm showing them pictures and videos and everything.

You have pictures and videos?

Yeah.

How do you have them?

Photographers that come after us to take the pictures.

So I'm showing what I saw and I'm explaining what I saw and what I thought.

And I talk about my experience and I also talk about growing up in Jerusalem during the second intifada, which is another ending to radical Islam is the second intifada.

People walk around and

chant intifada in their protests and they have no idea what that means.

That means buses exploding in the middle of Jerusalem and people at a club in Tel Aviv, 30 of them dying and 130 being injured because they went to a party in Tel Aviv and a suicide bomber exploded.

So that's what Intifada means to me.

So I go around and talk about those things and tell talk about my experience.

And it's been, I don't know, two months that I had to go back to Israel for two operations in between.

Really?

Yep.

I had to go back, did two operations, came back out.

Are you able to fly, like blood clots and all that other stuff?

Yeah, then I'm fine.

You're fine.

Yeah, I got cleared and everything.

I mean, so yeah, so I'm moving around.

I'm here in LA, going to San Francisco, going out to the University of Pennsylvania, University of Cleveland.

Who are you going to talk to?

Are you talking to students?

Open students.

They can come and hear.

So who hires you or brings you or whatever?

Who's so some of the events are private events that people hear about me and ask me to come?

Because you spoke, by the way, I should say, he did it.

We had hostages of the kidnapped family, sorry, the families of the kidnapped hostages here a few nights ago.

And

they're, I mean, amazing.

And my friend Brad Slater, shout out to Brad, brought Yadin here, Yadin.

And it was good, right?

You spoke so eloquent, so articulate.

Your story was just so incredible and so moving.

I mean, you really are a great speaker.

I mean, you should be doing this a lot because I feel like you really kind of explain the situation so well, like that people really can get like a taste for what really is going on.

That I'm so glad that you're doing a circuit of speaking because you.

And I really do believe that if we will never shoot first, never.

We never have and we never will.

And we can get to peace if the right people lead the Palestinian people to there.

It's not about they have a right to resist.

They have a right to whatever they want until they start killing and raping and burning our families.

So there can be peace, but there has to be two sides to it.

And we will never lift our guns up and shoot if they don't.

And that's it.

That's where it ends.

Well, they always say if they put down their weapons, there'll be no war.

If we put down our weapons, there'd be no

Jewish people or Israel.

That's true.

But then the last thing I want to ask you: why hasn't the special forces from the U.S., like the Delta Force and the Green Beret or whoever would do it, go into Gaza?

If they're already helping, are they helping?

I don't really understand what's going on.

There isn't, like, there aren't boots on the ground.

There aren't troops that are on the ground.

I don't think there should be.

Really?

Yeah.

Why?

I think that'll lead to a World War III.

I mean, we do have the ships that are surrounding us and helping us out.

We do have the U.S.

on our side at all times.

I spoke in Washington in front of the generals, the heads of CIA, FBI, telling them my story.

And I've been getting getting emails back from them that they've been telling my story in their base

to give their soldiers kind of a sense of i don't know camaraderie and and and fighting and battle and and friendship and everything so they're on our side i think they should leave the war for us and keep supporting but boots on the ground is a little is one step too far it is too much yeah why though i don't know it's just the the the the feeling is that if they put boots on the ground everybody's gonna join but like like and again, this is just again, one of these practical, like, could you, can people go into the tunnels and find these people?

Like, is it

like the hostages?

Like, how

no, because tunnels are all booby-trapped.

I mean, they, they control the tunnels.

We don't know what's going on.

And they're big, the tunnels, right?

Yeah, so there are some tunnels that are, you can drive a car in.

There are some tunnels that are for motorcycles, but you can walk in all of them.

And they're, they're miles long.

And they're all all like really complicated.

It's a whole city.

And all the money that's come from the world into Gaza has gone into that.

And the rest of Gaza are living in poverty.

And do you think that the Palestinians there, and this is, I'm sure I'll finish with my questions.

But do you feel like, what do you think the percentage of people who live there are are actually for Hamas?

Because there was a lot of people who were,

you know,

like they were like all like

very excited when the hostages came and they also did a lot of pillaging and raping and all that stuff.

The scary part is that 85% of Palestinians, West Bank and Gaza, supported what happened on 7th of October.

What's the percentage?

85.

Wow.

Yeah.

So 75 strongly supported, and then 10%

supported mildly.

That was the poll that came out.

Wow.

That is a problem.

But on the other hand,

that may be influenced by Hamas as well.

That number.

And they'll tell you to vote, but if you don't vote for them, they'll kill you.

Yeah, kill you.

And on the other hand, Palestinians that have been taken into custody or stopped in the war areas in Gaza have been telling our soldiers that Hamas has ruined Gaza and that they've been waiting for us to come.

We have videos of them yelling, We've been waiting for you to come for 15 years.

Palestinians, we, when when so my girlfriend was in gaza twice doing two different stories wow she drives in and you see humanitarian aid waving at them at the soldiers because the soldiers come and give them water and i mean the humanitarian aid i mean the humanitarian court uh corridor what is it called in english a corridor i think so okay humanitarian corridor yeah maybe they just let the civilians walk down and on the other hand hamas soldiers are shooting at them so that they won't leave the north the civilians Oh, I did hear that.

Yes, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And our soldiers are giving them water, and they're hugging us, and Hamas is shooting them on the other side.

So I really do believe that without Hamas, we have such a good chance for peace, and there could be such an amazing relationship between Palestinians and the Jews.

And it all started, I mean, we're always going back and forth, back and forth, but it all started with Ben-Gurion

saying that we are calling for independence, but we were doing it with our brothers, our Arab brothers, and together we will prosper.

He's the first one that said it, and he's right.

And this was 1948, and he was right.

We can do it together, and we never came

to fight, but we need a partner.

Wow.

My gosh.

This has been so

great.

So

I'm telling you, so riveting, eye-opening.

This was like such...

I really love this conversation.

I swear.

I don't know how I'm going to edit this thing, Michael.

Oh my God, I don't need that.

I know.

This is going to be like, this should be like part one, two, three through 10.

This is like a docuseries, really, I think, at this point.

My God, thank you so much for being on this podcast.

Yes, thank you for having me.

Where do people find you if they want to know more about you, which I'm sure they will?

My Instagram is at Yadine Gelman.

That's Y-A-D-I-N-G-E-L-L-M-A-N.

I'm mostly there, and I'm available to talk anywhere and fly out anywhere.

I'm always coming from Israel out to the U.S.

I'd love to come and speak wherever.

I think this story has to come out the best it can, everywhere, as fast as it can.

And yeah, we can go save the world.

Let's try.

Let's try.

Wow.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.