By Dana Ben Kaplan
SANTEE, California — This past September, I was contacted by the Emergency Volunteers Project (EVP) and asked if I would be available for another Israel firefighter training deployment, scheduled for October. I had been participating in these firefighter events in Israel for several years now (after retiring from the Santee Fire Department, in a suburb of San Diego).
Most of my previous trips were training deployments, but one was a war deployment: May 2023, Operation Shield and Arrow, deployed to Netivot, a town in the south. When I arrived for that last deployment in May, my driver met me at the airport and we headed south towards Gaza watching through the windshield as terrorist rockets flew toward Israel, most of them being intercepted by Iron Dome (Kipat Barzel), Israel’s short range anti-rocket defense system. It was quite a surreal view. About the time we reached the station, they were negotiating a ceasefire, so we saw limited “war-time” action (running instead mostly typical fire department calls, with few exceptions).
This deployment in October 2023 would be different.
I’d booked a flight with United Airlines to arrive in Israel Friday night, October 6, which would give me a day before the deployment’s start date (Sunday) to spend time on the beach in Tel Aviv. My plan for after the week-long deployment (where I could be sent anywhere in the country) was to spend another 2 1/2 weeks in-country, touching base with the family, and heading north to stay with my buddy at his place close to the Lebanese border, as I usually do. I arrived in Ben Gurion Airport, with nobody from EVP meeting me this time, picked up my Israeli SIM card at the bookstore, got a taxi through the GETT app, and “checked in” to my Tel Aviv Airbnb “autonomous” hotel around midnight (nobody works there — they WhatsApp you a front door code for the empty lobby, as well as the room lockbox code — I have no idea where the “managers” are located).
Around 6:30 a.m., I was half awake, when I heard what I thought was a fire engine siren. Strange, though, it wasn’t getting any closer, or farther; fire engines don’t do that. Then I heard a whoosh, followed by the loudest explosion I’d ever heard, which shook my building, and seemed to go through my body. It was a Hamas terrorist rocket hitting a nearby building in Tel Aviv. I’ve been involved in military Krav Maga training overseas, with rifle fire (blanks) all over a “battlefield”, and stood near .50 caliber rifle fire on an outdoor range, but this was a different kind of “loud.” Then, more sirens, and the double explosions of the interceptions (I’ll skip the details of what actually happens). This signature noise would become quite familiar, although I admit that I never got used to the volume, force, and energy of the explosions, sometimes close, even overhead while outdoors. Now, I WhatsApped the Airbnb’s customer service and asked where the safe room was, that I was on the third floor. They replied (literally) “oh, no! There’s no bomb shelter in the building. The safe area is floor -1” — in other words, the lobby of the spa (which was unstaffed). All morning, as sirens would go off, guests and a few pet dogs would gather there and wait a various number of minutes after the interception explosions, or until the siren stopped; nobody seemed to know how long it was safe to wait (these were mostly young tourists from Germany chatting online with their airline to try to get back home). But I was impatient to get to my fire station, any station. But things everywhere were chaotic; only two other firefighters on this team made it to Israel before all of the non-El Al flights were shut down, and the three of us were told to “standby.”
It was the holiday of Simchat Torah, so most Israelis were celebrating the holidays at home, as the terrorists knew… and they also knew it was the morning after the all-night Supernova music festival for youth next to Kibbutz Re’im in the south. Fliers for the festival had been brought back to Gaza and were found with terrorists, and civilian Palestinian invaders who had permits to cross into Israel each day to work in the kibbutzim. I later found out that was one of the many stories which U.S. and world media failed to tell. I guess it didn’t fit their narrative. Sadly, trusted long-time Gazan workers had betrayed their peace-seeking Jewish neighbors and friends.
It’s so strange to look back now at my iPhone Notes from the day of my arrival flight, listing such uninteresting things as my new Israeli cell number, the address of where in Tel Aviv I was going to stay, etc. Of course nobody here could have had any idea what the people of Israel would be facing starting that next morning.
Week 1, Operation Swords of Iron, Northern Israel
Finally, I was instructed to make my own way to the fire station where we three American firefighters would meet (myself, Arizona, and Texas) for our ride to a yet-to-be-determined station. For security reasons, even on training deployments we’re not told where we’ll be stationed until we get to the parking lot of Ben Gurion Airport, nor are we allowed to tell people back home exactly where we are, or post pictures to social media while in Israel, or even to send photos home. After deployment ends, everything is fine. We were driven north to Nof HaGalil (formerly Nazerit Illit). We had our own three-man bunkroom (after the Israeli firefighters moved out for us, as they usually do when we arrive at a station). This area of Israel is mostly Arabic, with both Christian majority, and Moslem majority towns (most villages are a mix of the two, to varying degrees). Many of our calls were vegetation fires, and there are no maps of the dirt roads and private access driveways which we need to navigate to reach these fires. So, normally, local young arabs doing national service ride on the fire engines to help the firefighters find the best route, as the local ranch owners will also know (and cooperate with) these fire department member’s, because they know their families. Being Arabic, they are not subject to conscription, in contrast to non-ultra-orthodox Jewish youth and most Druze. More and more of them feel (and I’m generalizing here) loyalty to the state of Israel and want to serve their country – they can and do join the IDF, but many opt instead for national service, which could be with the police, ambulance service, hospitals, or fire service. At the two stations I was deployed to this time, “fire scout” volunteers and firefighters came from these Israeli communities — Jewish: Morrocan, Iraqi, Yemenite, Ethiopian, Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Costa Rican, and I forget where else; as well as Druze, Arabic Christian and Muslim, Bedouin (one with a brother voluntarily serving in the IDF, already heading toward combat). It registered with me how much more varied in background the firefighters in the Israeli fire stations were, as compared to the stations I’d experienced in the U.S., both in California where I’d worked, and in Florida where I’d spent time riding along.
During the first day of that week-long deployment, Sunday, the day after the terrorist massacre in the south, I was in the parking lot when I heard gunfire, horns honking, fireworks, and yelling from cars driving by, below the other side of the parking lot. I started walking over there towards a few firefighters, as the convoy of cars were passing, asking them, “Is it a wedding?” I guess I was smiling a little; the Israelis weren’t. In one of those moments when you say something that you immediately wish you hadn’t, they just looked at me. “No. They’re celebrating.” That night we went on an outdoor fire, in a nearby village, Reina. The property owner drove up as we were putting out the fire, pretending outrage that someone had lit his cleared brush on fire; the commander looking at him, knowing that likely he lit the fire, or had someone do it. On the way back, driving through the village, we stopped at a hydrant to refill the fire engine’s water tank, almost right next to a large outdoor party, with everyone dancing. It could have been a birthday party. But I didn’t think so. By the next day, as TV started to report on the extent of the massacre and some of the details of what the Palestinians of Gaza (both Hamas terrorists and civilians who followed them in) had done to their innocent victims, the celebrations seemed to end. After a few more days we started to be routinely overflown by IAF F-35 stealth fighter jets as a show of force to Hezbollah in Lebanon (whose hills we could see in the distance from our parking lot). Apparently they didn’t get the message. We were sent running to our mamad sometimes many times per shift (actually a synagogue in this station, but built as the safe room). Here were some of the calls we ran: small grass and brush fires (as in southern California); trash fires (village locals trying to save money by not having to bring trash and cleared brush to the dump); ringing alarms; a large farm shed machinery fire; forcible entry through an apartment door to rescue an elderly lady who’d fallen, etc. No rocket or other enemy attack-related calls. At the start of that week, there was a typical number of firefighters carrying handguns (firefighters can get a license), as in one or two per crew. By the end of that first week, most of them were carrying a weapon.
I should say here that firefighters would occasionally watch TV; more or less, silently. All the Israeli TV stations which I saw during the period of time I was there had switched to 24/7 no-commercial coverage of… heartbreaking interviews of families whose loved ones were kidnapped, and unbelievable videos which terrorists had posted to social media of themselves committing rape, murder, mutilation, arson, kidnapping. I couldn’t necessarily follow the firefighter’s limited conversations, but I don’t think they were talking about the war. Five firefighters were murdered in the south on October 7. In a country with about 2,500 firefighters, a national fire department, and one fire academy, many of them knew a fellow-firefighter victim. I tried to imagine how that would impact us back home in the district where I had worked. We were told privately that the firefighters were not smiling as much as usual; not working out as a team, or cooking together as much. I could see that.
My two fellow American firefighters were scheduled to return to the U.S. at the end of that week (their return flights shifted to El Al) and I told EVP that I was going to stay in Israel, there was no way I was going to be leaving the country now, and that I wanted to volunteer for a 2nd deployment. In actuality, I was in limbo. United Airlines had immediately canceled my return flight at the start of the war, by text, and I eventually contacted their website chat (bot). Finally I was able to transition to a live human being – in India. She told me they could fly me home in a few weeks at the end of October, either through Amman, Jordan, or Athens, Greece. I chose Athens as a safer route, after one of the Israeli firefighters said that the road to Amman went through endless Palestinian “refugee camps” (cities and towns), and he’d advised against it. I told United I’d take the Athens flight, and asked if they could please fly me there from Israel. She said that I’d have to “drive to Athens, and submit for reimbursement for driving expenses by clicking on this link” (!). For those who may have seen a map of Israel and its neighborhood, you’d think that was really funny, and I told her so, and suggested she look at a map. She was unimpressed with my sarcasm and disconnected. So much for arranging my flight home with the airline who’d flown me in. I thought it was a good story, and was sorry I didn’t have a record of the chat exchange as I would have if it had been email, but honestly my mind was not on leaving Israel anyway.
This had been a great station — terrific firefighters (as always), decent variety of calls, excellent gym, safe neighborhood, great living / sleeping quarters (even a washing machine —usually on deployments at smaller stations we’d wash our uniforms in a sink and hang them dry outdoors). It was also a District Headquarters so we were given a tour of that large facility on the other side of the parking lot, including its dispatch center, where we met the young ladies working there. Returning to the station after a call, one particular company commander, whom I’d asked a question or two in Hebrew, handed me the mic and told me what to say to put us back in quarters. It became our routine. But the first time I did this, the dispatcher’s response was, “thank you” (in English). As the week came to an end, EVP sent someone to drive us three Americans down to Rishon Lezion, in preparation for my two partners to make it to the airport to fly home. Rishon Lezion is Israel’s 4th biggest city, a beach neighbor of and a bit south of Tel Aviv, in central coastal Israel, and home to the very impressive Israel National Fire and Rescue Academy. But first I was dropped at the large central fire station, where I’d stay as the solo American firefighter for the rest of my deployment.
Starting that Sunday October, 15, this second week of the war for me would be unlike the first.
To be continued…
NOTE: This article has been screened for Operational Security. Details are only to the best of my recollection, and I take full responsibility for inaccuracies.
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Dana Ben Kaplan, who teaches Krav Maga in San Diego, is a retired Santee firefighter.