Eleven days! Has it really been only eleven days? Every single day felt like five years. On each day they saw death in a thousand forms.
They crawl out of their trenches and they are only few. They carry on their backs dead comrades, dying comrades, wounded comrades. Comrades who can never be replaced. Every one has grown together with the unit, become a part of it - and leaves behind a painful gap.
They crawl out of their trenches - the soldiers of the southern front, who have overcome an enemy much stronger and better equipped. They held back the tanks almost with their naked hands, lived through endless battle, and did not flinch.
"Samson’s Foxes!" - the commando fighters in their shot-up jeeps, who raced along under fire, who drove into enemy positions, who stormed fortified villages, saved the wounded, and delivered ammunition to remote positions. How many of the original mem-bers of this unit are still alive? How many are unwounded?
The defenders of Negba - the men who lived in stifling bunkers and threw back assault after assault of tanks and infantry, who were bombarded twenty-four hours a day by artillery and aircraft, soldiers and "civilians" who moved around, crouching behind the cover of destroyed houses and burning barracks.
The fighters from the Ibdis position - who went through a hell almost beyond description and survived. Who held themselves with their fingernails onto the shaking, heaving ground.
They crawl out of the trenches in Julis and Karatiyya, in Beit Daras and Hatta, the few against the many, the Davids who have beaten the Goliaths.
They crawl out of their trenches and want to live. Every one of them was prepared to die and every one of them is only alive by chance. Each one of them has miraculously escaped a certain death a hundred times.
They crawl out of their trenches. The few, to whom the State of Israel owes a debt it can never repay.
Even after the ceasefire had come into force, operations in the area of Karatiyya continued. The enemy attacked the newly captured village very heavily. The capture of the village was intended to open the way to the Negev and prevent the enemy forces in Majdal and Iraq Suweidan joining up with those in Faluja and Iraq al-Manshiyya.