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After a Year of War, Wounded Israeli Reservists Face Long Road to Recovery

Reuters and Algemeiner Staff

Aaron Bours, 34, an Israeli reservist and marketing manager who was severely wounded fighting in Gaza, participates in physical therapy as he recovers at Sheba Medical Centre in Ramat Gan, Israel September 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

Ten months after he was shot in the leg by a sniper in Gaza, Israeli reservist Aaron Bours is walking on crutches and hoping to make a full recovery from the wound he sustained trying to rescue his officer in an ambush.

“There were bullets all around me,” Bours said.

Three hours after he was shot, he was in surgery at Sheba Medical center near Tel Aviv where doctors were able to save his leg. Long months of intense rehabilitation followed.

Some 300,000 reservists were called up at the beginning of the war and many have served for months on multiple tours. Their experience, and the experience of the families they left, will color attitudes in Israel for years to come.

As of September, more than 10,000 wounded soldiers have been treated by the Rehabilitation Department of the Ministry of Defense since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that triggered Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip.

More than two thirds of those treated have been reservists who returned to their military units from civilian life.

Just over a third are dealing with limb injuries, with the rest dealing with a variety of internal and spinal injuries, as well as eye, ear and head wounds that underscore the intense combat in the ruins of Gaza.

Israel Dudkiewicz, the doctor who runs the rehabilitation center at Sheba Medical Center, said the hospital understood on Oct. 7 that they would need to expand to receive an influx of wounded patients. With around a quarter of its staff called as reserves themselves, the hospital added beds and opened three new wings to treat the injured.

“I can’t say it wasn’t challenging,” said Dudkiewicz. “But in the end we were able to provide service.”

But the impact of serious injuries on reservists, who will return to civilian life when the fighting is over, will be felt for many years.

Yosi Sochr, 34, was severely wounded when an explosive device was detonated remotely. Doctors are still not sure if he will ever regain full use of his left arm and shoulder, which were hit by a piece of shrapnel.

So far he can move his hand but not the rest of his arm.

“It was hard,” said the reservist in the hospital bed next to his wife. “I’m not a 20-year-old kid. I have a whole world around me – when I just disappear, it’s felt.”

Sinwar, Hamas, have no intention of reaching hostage deal with Israel – NYT

JERUSALEM POST STAFF

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Illustrative image of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in front of an image depicting smoke rising after Israeli strikes in Khan Younis, Gaza. / (photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Shutterstock, REUTERS/IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA)

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar reportedly seeks a wider regional war and has hardened his stance on a hostage deal, US officials told the New York Times on Saturday.

Sinwars’ attitude has “hardened in recent weeks,” US officials told NYT, and they believe that Hamas currently has no intention of reaching a hostage deal with Israel. 

These US officials said Hamas has not shown any engagement or desire to continue talks in recent weeks. 

According to reports, Sinwar believed that he would not survive the ongoing Israel-Hamas War, which has allegedly hindered talks to secure and finalize a hostage deal, NYT reported, citing US intelligence assessments. 

According to SInwar, a larger regional war that sees further pressure on Israel would force the IDF to limit operations in the Gaza Strip, the US officials said.

IDF tanks operate in the Gaza Strip. Photo published October 3, 2024. (credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON’S UNIT)

The NYT report also stated that the ongoing ground operations by Israel in Lebanon and Iran’s ballistic missile strike on Israel and cited the US officials as saying that the failure of Hezbollah or Iran to damage Israel is a sign of Sinwar’s miscalculation. 

The NYT reported that the US officials estimated Sinwar’s reported gambit was a miscalculation in light of the ongoing Israeli ground operations in Lebanon and the Iranian ballistic missile attack, which failed to inflict much damage on Israel.

US also seeks to hunt down Sinwar

As a result, US spy agencies have reportedly formed a targeting cell to study and hunt down Sinwar. The officials did not share what intelligence had been found but said that, in general, Sinwar has become less flexible in the negotiation process.

Earlier reports circulated by Israeli and global media questioned whether Sinwar is still alive, but officials have said that the rumors could not be confirmed, as much of the communication between Sinwar and Hamas has been reduced.

NYT stated that while Sinwar was hiding, he understood that the IDF was closing in on him.

The military came near his position in August, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that IDF soldiers had found signs that Sinar spent time in tunnels beneath Rafah, near the tunnels where the six hostages were murdered in August. 

Nova Festival, Israel. October 7

StandWithUs

BBC airs Nova massacre film after insisting references to Hamas as terrorists removed

ToI Staff

‘We Will Dance Again,’ renowned 90-minute documentary detailing Palestinian terror group’s Oct. 7 onslaught at Israeli music festival, altered to align with contentious BBC policy.

Nova’s EDM music festival in southern Israel, as seen in Yariv Mozer’s documentary film, “We Will Dance Again.” (Courtesy of production)

“We Will Dance Again,” a full-length documentary film about the Hamas massacre of over 360 people at the Supernova music festival during the terror group’s October 7, 2023 assault on southern Israel last year, aired on Britain’s BBC2 on Thursday evening, though only after filmmakers agreed not to refer to Hamas as terrorists.

“It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not,” said Yariv Mozer, who directed the film, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

The UK public broadcaster was broadly criticized in the wake of the cross-border onslaught last year for its refusal to describe Hamas as terrorists, even though the group’s military wing is proscribed by the United Kingdom as such, and even after the widespread documentation of its systematic targeting of civilians that day.

“Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys,” BBC world editor John Simpson said in a column explaining the network’s position a few days after Hamas attacked.

“No one can possibly defend the murder of civilians, especially children and even babies — nor attacks on innocent, peace-loving people who are attending a music festival,” Simpson added.

“We Will Dance Again,” which runs 91 minutes and has also been shown across the world at special screenings and film festivals in recent weeks, delves into festival-goers’ experience during the all-night rave before it was attacked in the morning, and then documents the assault itself and relates the survivors’ efforts to piece together their lives in the aftermath.

We Will Dance Again | Paramount+ Official Trailer

(​​It is available for online users in the United States at Paramount+ and in the UK on the BBC2 website.)

It will also air on Israel’s Hot 8, Germany’s RTL, as well as on networks in Spain and Australia.

Images from Yariv Mozer’s documentary film, “We Will Dance Again.” (Courtesy of production)

The filmmakers worked with more than two dozen survivors of the festival, who told both their own stories and those of friends who were killed.

Related, from our partner: Nova victims receive emotional standing ovation at BBC documentary screening

Hamas-led terrorists killed a total of some 1,200 people that day, mostly civilians butchered at the rave or in their homes, and took 251 hostages, amid extensively documented acts of brutality and sexual assault, starting an ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian terror group.

Speaking at a screening in Los Angeles on Wednesday, producer Susan Zirinsky said there were “arguments” in the production process over how to graphically represent the atrocities, without making the film so difficult that nobody would watch it.

An aerial picture from October 10, 2023, shows the abandoned site of the Supernova music festival, near Kibbutz Re’im, where some 360 people were killed in Hamas’s brutal October 7 onslaught. (Jack Guez/AFP)

“Do we show somebody getting shot? Do we take that gunman going up to the person and then [pull] away, and then go back so that you know that person has been shot?” she recalled, according to The Wrap.

“But it was clear we wanted it to be a commercial film that will address people on mainstream channels,” he said. The filmmakers ultimately decided to blur victims’ faces after they were hit, while still depicting the atrocities committed by Hamas.

Mozer has also made films in recent years about senior Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, gay Palestinians, and then-IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. In 2017, Mozer won the Israeli Film Academy award for his documentary “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue,” about Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion.

A poster for ‘We Will Dance Again,’ a documentary about the Supernova desert rave, showing October 7, 2023 Supernova victim Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa. (Courtesy: Shax Photography and the production)

Mozer, Zirinsky and others have stressed that the film is apolitical. An opening title of the film notes, “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” adding: “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”

Nevertheless, similar efforts to tell the story of the attack on the Nova festival have been protested against, including a New York exhibit of personal artifacts from the festival that drew expressions of open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as chants endorsing the attack.