Yom Reva’ee
Wednesday
19 Av 5781
July 28 2021
The News on the Israeli Street
Palestinian terror in the last 24 hours . . .
Fires continue to erupt along the Gaza border as a result of explosive balloons launched by Palestinian terrorists. Here is one at Kibbutz Bari this morning:
The balloon landed beside the road and exploded.
An Israeli was badly wounded in a “rock” attack near Huwara on the way to the Tapuach Junction.
Another Israeli was wounded near the Hizma Checkpoint.
A Palestinian terrorist was shot and killed in Beta, near Eviatar.
The daily Corona update . . .
The American Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued a warning this morning that Americans who are not vaccinated should avoid going to Israel which has been raised to a level-3 status—one lower than the most serious.
There were 2,260 newly confirmed cases of Corona yesterday. 153 Israelis are now seriously ill and 28 are critically ill on ventilators–-meaning that Corona wards are beginning to reopen in Israeli hospitals.
The Bennett-Lapid governmental catastrophe gathers steam . . .
Today comes the news of the even greater headlong plunge into a government which embraces Islamist haters of Israel.
First, we have the sickening report that PM Bennett has decided that he will not obey any order by the Israel Supreme Court to evict the Palestinian squatters in Sheikh Jarrah and return the homes to their rightful Jewish owners. Lest we forget, these are squatters who moved in when eastern Jerusalem was ethnically cleansed of all Jews in 1948.
Second, we had the passage of a law yesterday that will permit PM Bennett to appoint Ra’am Party leader Mansour Abbas as Deputy to the Prime Minister.
Totally absurd . . .
What is the only government in the Middle East that has a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in its legislature?
Following the coup in Tunisia a few days ago after which the new rulers kicked the Brotherhood out of the Tunisian legislature, the only country with members of the Muslim Brotherhood in its legislature is Israel.
Just unbelievable.
TODAY’S BLOG:
Saving Private Gur, Part 2
A photo I took of Gur Nedzvetsky on the patio.
I left you yesterday on our shared patio at the guest lodgings near Kiryat Shmona.
At our request, a somewhat mysterious lodger named “Gur” from Gush Etzion had just told us the history of nanagata (Japanese fencing) and demonstrated some of its moves. He had then agreed to answer some of our questions.
To begin with, the lodger’s full name is Gur Nedzvetsky, and he let us know that he is 36 years old.
Then we asked how he became involved with nanagata–and his story began to unfold.
It turns out that he was a Staff Sgt in the IDF Special Forces Orev Paratrooper Brigade. Back in 2006, his unit was heavily engaged in the Second Lebanon War.
On the 8th day of the war, his 12-man-group was on a mission to raid a Hezbollah weapons repository when it was suddenly ambushed; soldiers were killed and wounded.
Including himself.
From a distance of 4 meters, he was shot three times: once in the leg, once in the stomach (fortunately that bullet was stopped by his vest), but the third bullet hit him in the mouth–traveled through his head–and exited his left ear.
(He told us about the bullet wound to his face to explain why he has a barely noticeable distortion on the left side of his face and mainly talks out of the right side of his mouth.)
Gur then told us that while lying on the ground and bleeding profusely, he didn’t know if he was going to die.
The quiet Gur then moved on to discovering nanagata–but I will postpone that until tomorrow.
Afterwards, I discovered an online article about Gur that appeared several years after the war (in 2008) in which he recalled: “I don’t know if I was preparing for the possibility of death. I remember mainly seeing bad pictures going through my mind. It was not a clear, reasonable thought, but rather something that I kept trying to push aside.”
That same article described how his fellow soldiers were able to keep the Hezbollah fighters at bay–for hours until the next morning.
And revealed the following:
Because of the intense ongoing firefight, it was impossible for an evacuation helicopter to land, but a heroic pilot, 42-year-old Lt. Col. Avner Balkany, finally managed to get his helicopter down to a level ten feet above the ground where it hovered while Gur’s comrades pushed the stretcher that Gur was now on into the chopper (he was too badly wounded to be winched up). The story of Gur’s heroic rescue can be seen here in a video entitled “Saving Private Gur” in which you can see the meeting of Gur and Balkany.
While this was going on, the Hezbollah fighters poured rounds into the badly damaged helicopter and continued trying to kill our soldiers. The helicopter almost lost its tail rotor when it got caught on a high bush. Lt. Col. Balkany later recounted: “I rescue people for a living . . . But this rescue operation was different. It changed me and left a deep mental and emotional scar. The level of the risks were high and I was aware of them while I was preparing to land with intense gunfire and missiles being fired at us. The tail propeller was scrubbing a tree and I wasn’t sure how long the damaged helicopter could continue to hover or whether it could fly us to the hospital.”
Finally when Gur was on board, Lt. Col. Balkany made a mad dash to Haifa’s Rambam Hospital.
Back to the patio . . . remember that the soft-spoken, modest Gur did not tell us anything more about his wounds or about his evacuation after revealing that he had been shot. All of that information above comes from other sources.
We will continue Gur’s story of survival and rehabilitation tomorrow.
In the meantime, you may want to check this out this video about the remarkable Gur.
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A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.