Yakir doesn't know when he'll be able to speak to his boyfriend again once his Israeli army unit goes into the Gaza Strip to fight Hamas.
Yakir doesn't know
when he'll be able to speak to his boyfriend again once his Israeli army unit
goes into the Gaza Strip to fight Hamas.
"I haven't
told my family I am going inside Gaza. I don't want them to be worried. Only my
boyfriend knows I'll be inside."
"I don't know
what kind of mission I'm going to get, or if I will even come back alive."
The 33-year-old
was speaking to me hours before the mission was due to start, and he said he
had permission from his superiors to speak to the BBC.
In his interview,
he said he felt Israel was given no option after the attacks of 7 October but
to go into Gaza to destroy Hamas.
"If they
didn't fear to enter Israel, we mustn't fear to go into Gaza, to make sure they
will never do again what they did a month ago to innocent people, babies and
children."
Yakir was called
up along with hundreds and thousands of reservists, immediately after the
attack in which 1,200 people were killed and some 240 taken hostage.
On the day of the
attack, he and his boyfriend were asleep in their apartment when they were
suddenly woken by red alerts on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Home Front
Command app, which warns of incoming rocket attacks.
"I live in
Ramat Gan, next to Tel Aviv. We're used to alarms. I just went back to
sleep," he recalls.
"But a little
while later, my boyfriend shook me to tell me that terrorists had entered
Kibbutz Be'eri and kidnapped 20 people… It was only a little part of what was
happening."
"I understood
how big it was. You knew it before the government said it. I got my bag ready,
and said, 'Oh My God, I am now saying goodbye to my normal life.'"
Yakir didn't want
to be a soldier, he tells me. He didn't enjoy the army because he didn't like
being ordered to do things.
Military service
is compulsory in Israel and like all conscripted men, he served three years
until the age of 21. He remains eligible for reserve duty until he is 40.
Before 7 October,
he wanted to go to the doctor to ask them to say that he was not fit to be a
reservist on medical grounds.
Immediately after
the Hamas attack, Israel launched its offensive with the declared aim of
destroying the group. The war has so far killed more than 11,000 people in
Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, including more than 4,500
children.
I ask him what he
thought of the civilian casualties. Yakir avoids answering my question
directly, except to say that the IDF gives prior warning to evacuate civilians
before striking.
But in a war, he
says, civilian deaths are unavoidable. "You have to remember, we didn't
start this war."
Instead of waiting
to be called up, he put himself forward for active duty and tells me that he is
fighting to live in a world in which Hamas - which Israel, the UK and other
countries consider a terrorist organisation - no longer exists.
"But it was
not easy, to leave what seemed like a perfect life for me, until that morning
of 7 October."
While he was
waiting to be deployed, he wanted to make the most of his "normal
life" with his boyfriend. They went to the familiar places that they
enjoyed visiting before 7 October.
"There's a
lake in Ramat Gan national park. I went there with my boyfriend and some other
friends. I just wanted to look at the dusk. I felt that it was the last time I
was having a normal life before I was going to the army. I was sitting there,
looking at the water, and quietly saying goodbye."
Yakir was first
deployed in the southern town of Sderot. He spent two weeks patrolling the
city's streets. There were reports of Hamas gunmen still at large, and he saw
some gunmen being captured.
"I didn't
sleep a lot. Fear was waking me up. I was missing my family. I was tired,
hungry."
We spoke as Yakir
was preparing to enter Gaza, on foot and after nightfall. He didn't know how
long his deployment would be.
"Inside Gaza,
we won't have any cell phones. The enemy can track them and strike with
missiles," he said.
During a recent
operation on the Gaza border, Yakir says, the whole unit had only one phone
between them - a secure military phone - which he was sometimes able to use to
send a short message to his boyfriend to say he was ok. His boyfriend then
passed those messages on to his family.
But this time he
thinks it might not be so easy to stay in touch.
Yakir just wants
to believe that the war will be over quickly, or else that he will be replaced
by another soldier, so that he can go back home.
The lives of all
Israelis have changed forever, Yakir tells me, and he is driven by a sense of
unity that he tells me everyone in Israel feels at the moment. "Feeling
unsafe is our national trauma now."
Before the war,
the country was deeply divided over the government's controversial judicial
overhaul plans, which led to months of protests.
"What
happened shocked the country so much that we decided we didn't want to fight
with each other anymore," Yakir says. "The 7th of October reunited
us. Orthodox and non-Orthodox, right wing and left wing, we're one nation
today."
As we end our
call, Yakir tells me that he is very afraid.
"I know
terrorists can pop up from tunnels, shoot at us and go back into the
tunnels."
"Already one
officer of my unit has been killed. They can shoot rockets at us, and there are
no alerts in Gaza."
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