Khane

It seems that you are a new reservist so maybe you'll get the Tavor someday; I upgraded from M-16 to Galil when I was already a reservist and even later from Galil to the short M-16. Khane

Like Oren I had a very good experience with the Galil. Never had a jam and it went on working perfectly well even after being into sand or mud. I already was a reservist when the first Galil appeared; I was the RPG guy of my platoon and before the Galil my automatic rifle was a M-16 , the original one. Because of its length, going around with it (specially running) while the RPG on my back was a bit uncomfortable. I was very pleased when the Galil replaced my M-16 because in spite that it was heavier than the M-16 it was shorter, specially once the stock was fold and so easier to handle. Later the short version of the M-16 replaced the Galil and it was ideal: short , light and almost as reliable as the Galil. Apart on photos I never saw the Tavor. Khane [ August 20, 2006, 10:13 AM: Message edited by: Khane ]

Things are starting to move; I hope that something positive will come out these investigations but the truth is that I am a bit pessimistic on that issue: as usual those responsible for the fiasco will try to cover their butts and put the blame on others. Right, that's the feeling From Mania to Depression Khane

Interviews with IDF soldiers back from Lebanon Part two "It is as if nobody had prepared" accuses another fighter. "There was no clearing out of the terrorists by the Nahal Brigade infantry. I don't understand why they did not let the Nahal finish their job before sending us in. We thought that we were entering the Saluki after the area had been cleaned up, but then the terrorists came out of the houses and hiding places and started shooting at us as if we were in a shooting range. Nobody really had any idea how big the terrorist forces were". "When the first tank was hit, we knew that the nightmare had begun" says a fighter. "You should understand that the first missile which hits is not the really dangerous missile. The ones which come afterwards are the dangerous ones - and there always follow four or five after the first. It is awesome! You just think :where can I hide?' and fear the unknown. It was hellfire, you have no idea when it will get to you. You just pray that it will end at last, that the volley will end and that you will hear on the radio that everybody is OK. But unfortunately, that is not what we heard when the shooting ended, no sir!" "This was supposed to be the final accord of the war" says one of the soldiers. "But it was much worse than the battles in the beginning of the war. They told us that this will be just the final accord, that the cease-fire is on the way, but the tanks were hit and we lost precious fighters". More than causing them to wonder, the talking of "a Battle of Awareness" is insulting for the fighters which left Lebanon yesterday. "To say that the fighting there was conducted in order to gain an achievement in awareness is an insult" says a junior officer of the armoured brigade. "Soldiers' parents call me since early this morning, asking me about this expression. What can I say to bereaved parents, when they hear that their son died for 'an achievement in awareness'? I feel that whoever spoke this way had hurt me personally, me and my soldiers. To say 'an achievement in awareness' after a battle from which you emerge unscathed - OK. But this was a very bitter end-of-the-war battle in which 12 soldiers got killed and ten tanks got hit by Hizbullah fire. This is an achievement in awareness? This is a failure. We just did not know what was going on?". "I can't connect this statement about the achievement in awareness to anything which actually happened" says a senior officer. "They all the time demanded of us to produce photos of dead terrorists, terrorists with hands raised. To form the consciousness of the Israeli public. I think that first you have to kill the enemy, only then can you start taking photos of their dead bodies. And still, there is some importance from the awareness point of view to entering deep into enemy territory. To show them that we are no longer hesitating near the border, as were in the first 24 days, but passing the Saluki and moving forward. You prove to the enemy that you posses the ability to enter his territory". What is clear now is that, while there could be some debate about the awareness, the pain of the fighters is unmistakable. "It is very sad that exactly at the end of the war, when everything is already ready to a cease-fire, we get such grave blows" says a fighter on the day after leaving Lebanon. "It should not have happened. We feel that this battle just should not have happened. Of course, we are soldiers and we fulfil every mission placed upon us, but when we look at what happened there and what surprises were waiting for us, we just were ****ed. We were caught unprepared". There are very hard feelings among the soldiers" admits a junior officer who took part in the battle. "Just in the end, when everything, the whole war, was about finished, that's when we got the big blow. Somebody should investigate what happened there in the Saluki. We already thought that we were going home smiling, with flags flying - and here we go to comrades' funerals." A senior officer of the brigade responds: "It was a super-important mission!" About the initial decision: "Can anybody point a better point where the Saluki can be crossed? There are several passes, all of them narrow. The one we chose was the correct one. The risk is obvious, when you get to the ground there is a chance that you will be shot at. War is a dangerous game. Clearing the area: "The Nahal Brigade was sent to take over the area and they did that. But you can't achieve a hundred per cent clearance. You have limitations when you use a combined armour/infantry force. When there is infantry in the area, the tanks can't shoot freely. The action: We sent in a primary force of 12 tanks, to cross the wadi. We blazed a trail and bypassed the bridge crossing the Saluki. Then we planned to send in 30 tanks because we knew that this is an inferior terrain and therefore we did not want to put big forces at risk. But the two tanks which arrived in the village of Randuriya found their route blocked by the collapse of buildings which were bombed by the air force. The battle: While the tanks were searching for another way an explosive charge went off behind them. The road collapsed and then the first tank was hit by a missile. The entire first crew, of Company Commander Bernstein, was killed. The tank behind Bernstein tried to move back and take a new position. Effi Dafri, Commander of the 9th Battalion, was already wounded before this stage; now his deputy Shimi Batat was wounded as well. After that, the third tank was also hit, and the advance stopped. The failure: Sending in the tanks was vital, full stop. When the infantry arrives they need a day or two to take control of the area. They have no possibility to penetrate to a depth of ten kilometres. Only the tanks can break forward. Already on the same night another battalion arrived, blazed another trail and penetrated forward with its tanks. The officers who make all this criticism don't really know what had happened there. Of 12 tanks only 2 were hit. The losses are grave but this should be placed in proportion to the fact that the mission was defined as super-important. The withdrawal: I was surprised to get the order to withdraw from this area just a short time after we reached Randuria, at the cease-fire. I think that the fighting should have been continued westward so as to deepen the achievement. Khane

Interviews with IDF soldiers back from Lebanon by Nava Tzuriel and Eitan Glickman from the Israeli most read daily newspaper "Yediot Aharonot". August 16, 2006. Part one (sorry for lenght of the post. That's a translation from Hebrew and there is no link) "The commanders told us that the infantry had already cleared the area, and then the tanks started getting hit, tank after tank. Why did they send us into this hell? Why did they send us into the missile trap? We already though we were going to go home smiling and with the flags flying - and instead, we go to our fellows' funerals." Yesterday, a bit after 10.00 am, the tank soldiers of the 401th Brigade left Lebanon in a long and dusty convoy, and at long last they could breath freely. They did not have many such moments since Saturday noon, the bitter time when they tried to cross Wadi Saluki in the Western Sector of South Lebanon, only to find that they had blundered into a well-prepared Hizbullah anti-tank ambush. Yesterday they could at last embrace each other, call their parents, ask for the condition of their wounded comrades - but the hard questions did not stop for a moment. "Why did they send us into that hell?" one of the soldiers asked angrily. "Why did they send us directly into the missile trap? Now everybody sees that the last days of the fighting were not sufficiently prepared". It was one of the hardest and most tragic battles which the IDF had known in this war. Nine tanks were hit by missiles, there in the Saluki. 12 soldiers were killed, a few hours after the UN security Council unanimously adopted a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Lebanon. Already one day after the battle there were IDF officers charging that entering the wadi (canyon) was hurried and unnecessary, that the tanks should not have been sent into the steep-banked wadi and made into movable targets, and that the area was not cleared of terrorists by the IDF. The blows which the fighters suffered on the field were painful - but perhaps the most painful blow came later, when the soldiers heard the words of several senior officers. "This was a Battle of Awareness against the Hizbullah" an unnamed senior officer told Yediot Aharonot two days ago [August 14]. "We have proven that this legend, as if a regular army cannot fight guerillas, is not true". As much as the fighters are now angry at the insufficient preparation and the mistakes in the conduct of the battle, they feel deeply insulted by those who sent them to the field of slaughter and who now tell them that the battle was not really necessary - that it was just a kind of "Battle of Awareness", a kind of show designed to demonstrate to Hizbullah who is the Boss. This is not the first blow which the IDF gets in Wadi Saluki.Lebanon veterans remember well earlier tough fights in this small stream below the village of Randuriya. The worst mishap in the Saluki, up to the present, was in August 1997. Soldiers of the Golani Brigade had set a routine ambush when news came of six Hizbullah men having infiltrated the area. IDF artillery opened fire a kilometre away, but failed to knock out the infiltrators. Due to the intensity of the shelling, a fierce brush fire broke out, and four of the Israeli soldiers were trapped and burned to death. The Armoured Corps soldiers were notified of the present Saluki action several days before being sent in, and were told that infantry soldiers of the Nahal brigade would go in well in advance of them to clear out the terrorists and ensure a smooth passage to tanks. The situation on the ground, however, turned out to be very different. Hizbullah squads had prepared their positions in the villages above the wadi long in advance, and when the tanks arrived they were subjected to a relentless attack. "We thought we were going into a lightly-defended, easily-passed area, and we found ourselves in a fiery hell" says with pain one of the fighters. "The Nahal went away, we got the order to go in with the tanks and we got anti-tank fire from all directions. Nobody believed we could possibly get into such a trap. It is a total fiasco. Why did nobody check to make sure there were no anti-tank squads in the upper ridges, before sending us to be totally exposed to fire from these ridges?". "And why was it needed to go to this whole operation to start with, when everybody knew that within two or three days there would be a cease-fire?" wonders one of the junior commanders. "Did nobody worry about anti-tank fire? Did the higher command not think about it? Everything was foggy, unclear. When we went in we knew that there will be a battle, that there will be terrorists, we were prepared for being attacked, but going into battle was slow and clumsy. All this time the other side was preparing and organizing, with high-grade missiles. I don't know why the people whose mission was to prepare for this kind of situation just did not do their job, they just did not do what was needed to prevent this damn fiasco". The forces which went out of Lebanon heard of the mutual recriminations between Armour and Infantry regarding the responsibility for the grave results of the Battle of the Saluki. "The fighting was hard" says one of them "but the lack of coordination between the forces on the ground, between what we were told was going to happen and what actually happened was the biggest mishap in the last days of the Lebanon fighting. Khane

IDF reservists: Officers stopped us from attending anti-war protest It's like Yom Kippur War Khane [ August 17, 2006, 09:32 PM: Message edited by: Khane ]

I don't know how much stoned they are but what is sure is that they are excellent propagandists. Khane

Lebanese source Khane

Nobody wins and nobody loses. Only a misunderstanding Khane

No at all, that would only mean that in general a Israeli reserve forces reservist has looser uniform and grooming standards than his fellow conscript soldier of the same unit. I said "the more elite the unit is , the less "uniform snobs" the soldiers are" and not "the less uniform snob a soldier is , the more elite he is." Sure they can be, why not; I don't see how it contradicts what I said. Where did I say that you can't be an excellent elite unit soldier if you are uniform snob or that loose uniform and grooming standards are IDF prerequisites for being an elite combat unite soldier? Being a uniform snob or not being a uniform snob is one thing and being an excellent fighter is an other thing. Khane

John, Two analysis about the command problem in the Northern command A babysitter up north There appears to be a command problem in the north Khane

Steve, that's more or less the way I looked when I was in the IDF. Shame on me I don't know if this specific black hat of the first paratrooper in the photo is a genuine IDF one but this "funny" hat is not different than the one I was sometime wearing when I was in the army. According the photo I guess that these soldiers are training or on their way back from training but certainly not in a combat area. In general Israeli combat unit soldiers are not big "uniform snobs". The more elite the unit is , the less "uniform snobs" the soldiers are. New recruits. This photo is one of fresh new recruits , candidates for a elite unit, during a test before being accepted to training school. Training IDF "Raful" bush hat Eite unit candidates on their first day test Elite unit canditates Elite unit soldier with "funny" hat By the way this Israeli special forces site may interest you; a lot of photos with a lot of "clueless tourists" Khane [ August 09, 2006, 03:37 AM: Message edited by: Khane ]

I forgot that one. What a versatile weapon :eek: Khane

No idea but what I happen to know is that they are not only used to transport supplies but also as a very powerful weapon : they spit at enemies. Khane

Cool Israeli paratroopers supplies/weapons carriers

Originally posted by wade_Angler: LOL ! Khane

Originally posted by wade_Angler: It seems you are quite an expert. You are back from Bint Jbeil I presume. Khane

Originally posted by Romulus: The media of a country at war is alway "a bit" propagandistic. It is also quite difficult to sell the readers of these newspapers that people who only yesterday have fired missiles into their towns and villages are "fighters" even if right now in that particular place , Bint Jbeil, once they cannot fire missiles anymore, they fight with courage and determination in a fierce close ranged combat. Khane

Originally posted by oren_m: Thanks Oren. It seems that my take about all that Lebanon stuff is different than yours. I don't buy the official version of the how and why of the events as they are given by our government officials but I cannot but respond to the blind hatred against Israel. I love to live in this country and it is very important for me; that's why I criticize the politics of its government when I think it's a wrong one but that's also why I respond to disgusting hate posts like those directed toward you. Right now it seems that a hell of a battle in going in Bint Jbeil. I was in Lebanon in there in 1982 as a reservist and during a few other reserve periods the following years (I was what we call in Hebrew a "RPGist"). I remember that already during these reserve periods we considered the Hezbollah fighters as excellent. Knowing their determination and knowing Bint Jbeil itself I am not surprised of the intensity of the fight there; the Hezbollah is giving a good fight. Bint Jbeil will fall with a heavy price but I hope the less heavy as possible; this battle will certainly be remembered by the Hezbollah as a heroic stand against superior forces and by us as a fierce battle in which we learned a lot. Khane [ July 26, 2006, 09:59 AM: Message edited by: Khane ]

Originally posted by wade_Angler: Do you know from good sources that these pilots (I mean those who were in the Apaches that crashed because whatever causes) : 1. have been operating Apaches on assassination missions in Gaza and the West Bank for the last 5 years ? 2. that during these 5 years there were no crashes and no malfunctions ? Say mid air collisions, electric cable encounters, mechanical malfunctions, pilot error, Bermuda factors, satanic wind shears malfunction and we’ll castrate you, the wade_Anglers warn Don't tell me you believe this myth ,this JewishZionistImperialistTigerofPaper...etc propaganda. Here you sense of humor (very cool,really) matches you hatred of anything Israeli. By the way don't believe that the tsunami of 2004 that caused the death of killed approximately 230,000 people was a natural accident. The Zionist have succeeded ,until now at least, to hide the truth: it was a Zionist conspiracy. :eek: Salamat and take care Khane [ July 26, 2006, 07:38 AM: Message edited by: Khane ]

Bingo ! Well said dixon In spite the Yom Kipur war of 1973 and our questionable and painful adventure in Lebanon in 1982 ,most Israelis (including me sometime) have a kind of "Six Days war" syndrome. If a military operation is not as swiping with a relatively low number of causalities like the Six Days war, it is viewed as a failure , almost the beginning of the end. Khane

Originally posted by Saviola: I also don't buy the story that all the **** in the north is to free the soldiers but how do you know that the Israeli commanders "knew" it would come soon? Did you read their minds ? If the aim of Israel is to have a bear-foot and pregnant Lebanon (or other neighboring states) for ever whether they mess with Israel or not, why should Israel send a message at all. "Lebanon if you don't mess with us we won't destroy you competitive economy!" It sounds like you personally analyzed Sharon and Olmert in your office to make such a detailed psychological analysis. If the Israeli establishment does all the destruction and death only to kill the economic threat that Lebanon causes (according to you) then this establishment is a collection of war criminals; why should they reprimand an other war criminal? Who are according to you those Israelis who want a bear-foot and pregnant Lebanon to the north for ever ? I barely remember what I did last summer so can you give me a list of all the former summers during which Israel has attacked Lebanon infrastructures in such a large scale as it does now or such an attack that could kill the tourist season? Nasty post. Any personal hard feelings toward Oren maybe? Khane

You mean a translated version of the Israeli military aerial photograph map posted by Hans. :cool: I bet so Khane

If you mean in the Tantura village ,then there was a fight but before the masscre. The map is on the way Khane [ July 18, 2004, 08:51 AM: Message edited by: Khane ]

The picture is of a battle that took place in the First Arab-Israeli War. This is part of the Operation called Coastal Clearing performed by the Thirty Third Battalion (the Third Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade) of the Haganah (former IDF's name). The action on the picture took place sometime in May 1948 along the North costal plain , around 20-30 kilometers South of Haifa. On the left side of the map near the top (along the shore) you got 2 names , one just under the other. The one on the top ( the biggest one ) is Tantura a Arab village situated on the Lagoon as you can see on this picture ( you can see the town of Haifa on the North of the picture ) In 2000 a Israeli researcher Teddy Katz who made a researcher for his Master degree show what according to him are the evidences of the massacre of 200 villagers perpetrated by the soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade in the Tantura's village during the operation. Until today there is much controversy on the subject about the massacre itself and on the number of victims.