Jacob Siegel
“It was absolutely abysmal. I mean, it was shocking the equipment that we were given.”
Eitan was 27 years old on Oct. 7 when he got the alert. (Soldiers who are identified by their first names only have had their names changed.) He had finished his active military time in 2022 after serving in one of the IDF’s elite commando units. Out of the army, Eitan was studying for a master’s in business. Like most able-bodied Israelis of fighting age, he continued his military service as a reservist. In his part-time unit, he joined what is known in Hebrew as miluim, the term used for the IDF’s reserve forces that have historically functioned as the backbone of Israel’s people’s army. Miluimniks, who have already gone through training and served in a regular unit, provide a standing reserve that can be called on to plug gaps in the nation’s defense or rapidly built out to augment the army’s order of battle in the event of war. That, in any case, was the longstanding theory of Israel’s strategic concept as a small country surrounded by hostile powers.
The IDF’s problem was that its leaders had spent decades under the illusion that ground wars requiring mass mobilizations, which are the miluim’s raison d’être, were a thing of the past. In ideal circumstances, a reserve force will still operate at a level of funding and equipment below its active-duty counterparts. But in Israel, where the reserves were no longer seen as vital to the military’s offensive capabilities, the situation had moved past nonideal to dangerously unprepared.
Eitan, serving in the reserve component of a special operations unit, should have had better gear than most. Yet, even for the elite commandos of miluim, the initial supply situation was dismal. “It was vests and helmets that we wouldn’t have been given in basic training, let alone when we were combat soldiers. Uniforms falling apart, all of the Velcro ripped and destroyed. The zippers didn’t work. Helmets from the 1980s when my dad was in the army. The guns were mostly old surplus and we didn’t have ceramic vests.” To the best of his knowledge, Eitan told me, no one in his battalion had ceramic vests when the war started.
By the time night fell on Oct. 7, 2023, Eitan had joined up with his reserve unit and was fighting the remnants of the Hamas raiding party that had infiltrated into southern Israel that morning, breaching the security fence, overwhelming border defenses, and killing nearly 1,200 people, including women and children sheltering in their homes, before carrying some 250 hostages back into Gaza. For three days Eitan and the other special operations veterans in his unit engaged in nearly continuous battle. The first real rest he remembers getting came on Oct. 10 when his battalion took over an evacuated school.
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