Outside a ruined house in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza on Wednesday, Lt.-Col. Almog told a group of reporters: “The enemy placed explosives and prepared ambushes and waited for us. We found explosive devices and booby traps in each of the houses. But the 202nd Battalion has been fighting for eight months in Gaza; the weaponry and means of combat we found there weren’t any different. There was an enemy here – a stubborn one. They fought for this place – and died in it.”
Almog, 36, from Kibbutz Neot Mordechai in the Upper Galilee, is the commander of the Paratroopers Brigade’s 202nd Battalion.
It is a regular formation, one of the three battalions of this most-storied of IDF infantry brigades. The 202nd has spent the last two weeks in the heart of Jabalya. The area is still not completely pacified, and small arms and tank fire could be seen close by.
In the course of its operations in Jabalya earlier this week, the 202nd recovered the bodies of four Israelis murdered by Hamas on October 7: Itzik Gelenter, 57; Amit Buskila, 28; Shani Louk, 23; and Ron Binyamin, 52.
How the IDF was able to return the bodies of hostages
I attended the funeral of Louk in her hometown, Moshav Srigin, south of Beit Shemesh in the Eila Valley. Coming to this place can tell us more about how her body was found and about the soldiers who carried the mission out.
“The intelligence we had on this place came from the brigade and battalion intelligence level,” Almog said, “and we came to the conclusion that something was unusual here… It’s a combination of several factors – intelligence at the brigade level, the tactical force that locates the site, and then the force from the Yahalom [Combat Engineering Corps reconnaissance] unit that carried out its specialized work.”
The paratroopers’ tactical force, which entered the house and located the shaft in which the bodies were located, was led by Lt. Roi Beit Yaakov, 22, from Eli, who was killed last week in Gaza fighting.
His squad captured the house as part of the 202nd’s battle with Hamas terrorists.
“Something seemed to Roi to be unusual in this house,” Almog said. “So he started to investigate, moving furniture around, shifting rugs, and they found an opening in one of the rooms, leading to a shaft.”
Beit Yaakov reported the finding of the shaft to his company commander, Maj. Gal Shabbat, who was killed later in the week. Shabbat then set in motion the process of searching the shaft. A Yahalom unit was called in.
“They reached the bodies themselves, and they were identified, and in the end, it became clear that they were the bodies of the four people that you were aware of,” Almog said.
Inside the house, we must move carefully over the rubble. Through the darkness, we found our way to the room where the shaft was located. It was still open. We approached it carefully, shining flashlights in the darkness.
The shaft is a nondescript hole in the floor. The opening is narrow, one meter by one meter, and there is a metal ladder leading down. The shaft is about 10 meters deep and leads to a tunnel.
When Beit Yaakov’s force entered, it was concealed by a rug. The atmosphere in the house is close and fetid.
Maj. A, a member of the Yahalom unit that searched and secured the shaft, told us outside the house: “We were able to identify unusual elements, and these, in the end, led us to find the bodies... When we entered the shaft, we didn’t know that there were bodies down there.”
He carefully avoided any discussion of the precise methods used by his force.
A Channel 13 reporter asked Maj. A about the dilemma of risking the lives of soldiers to extricate the corpses of the dead.
“No dilemma,” he said. “We’re committed to hunting Hamas tunnels and to bringing all the hostages home to Israel, dead or alive, everyone.”
Almog later said it was “enough for a commander to miss something, and it might never be found. It’s about the instincts and the field knowledge of the commander, who in this case chose to go that little bit further. To move a rug, which he could have ignored. But he didn’t.
“So he found a shaft. We’ve found many in the past. But Roi decided to stay and search the house. He could have kept going. Roi was a squad commander of the highest level, and his memory will be with us forever, like all the fallen of this war and all the wars of the past,” Almog said.
Beit Yaakov was killed two days after the discovery of the bodies. He was killed along with four of his comrades in a friendly fire incident in the heat and confusion of the battle in Jabalya. That same day, Shabbat, from Katzir, Roi’s company commander to whom he reported the discovery of the shaft, was killed by an enemy sniper.
The fight for Jabalya continues, and the main battle in Gaza is now farther south in Rafah, while politicians continue to squabble and maneuver for position.
It’s difficult to spend any amount of time with the fighters on the ground in Gaza and not conclude that they deserve better than all that. Not that this seems to affect the starkness and strength of their commitment.
“There is an organization here that had a long time to prepare,” Almog said, “and war isn’t a matter of a few months, and we’re done. War, as the cliché has it, is the kingdom of the unknown. And we’ll return to places where we were before because the enemy doesn’t always cooperate, and intelligence improves and sharpens. That’s legitimate. It’s a long war. No one thought it would finish quickly. We started in winter; now it’s summer. And if we have to fight again in winter, that’s fine, and in the end, we’ll bring security for Israel.”
Yosef, one of his paratroopers, from a haredi family in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vagan neighborhood, standing in the rubble outside the building where the bodies of the murdered Israelis were found, said: “We keep on going. It’s hard work but satisfying.” Then, reaching for an appropriate metaphor, he concluded, “It’s an extraordinary feeling to be here, you know. Like Samson, in a way.”
At Louk’s funeral in Srigim, her father, Nissim Louk, told the mourners: “The blood of the murdered ones, and Shani among them, was not abandoned and cried out from the ground.”
This is the story of those who heard and those who brought her home.