This is part of a series, “Uprooted.” Each column is a curated monologue from an individual among the tens of thousands of internally displaced Israelis during the war with Hamas who were evacuated from the country’s northern border and the Gaza envelope. I woke up at around 8 a.
m. It was completely quiet around us. I turned on my phone and read about what was happening in the south.
I turned on the TV and from that moment, I was glued to it all the time for a whole month. I followed the incidents and stories from the people who were there. I have two sons who live in Dafna.
One lives next door to me, and the second is farther away. Sarel (48) was called up for reserve duty with the Hermon Alpinists. Zohar (50) was also called up and has been in an intelligence control room by the border ever since.
When there were protests against the judicial reform, we would go to them together, and I remember telling them one day that if a war broke out they weren’t to serve in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s army. The day the war began, they both enlisted even though they no longer had to. At the beginning of their reserve duty, I was mainly worried for Sarel, who was on the border with Syria.
He did his military service in Golani when the IDF was in Lebanon. One day, while I was working as a nurse in the kibbutz clinic, a friend came in and showed me an article in the newspaper about the IDF killing a Lebanese official with a photo of the group that handled the operation. .
