What ceasefire in Lebanon?

Last night, my IDF Palmar medical evacuation team and I treated and extracted two soldiers from Lebanon. Tragically, Captain Maoz Israel Recanati (24) z”l, did not make it, killed a month before his wedding. The other soldier survived, but will need a series of surgeries. Yet, I read reports that the ceasefire will be extended for another 45 days.

There is no ceasefire.

I feel like I am in an Orwellian novel. President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the mainstream media are hawking the ceasefire. Yet, the reality could not be more different. Nineteen-year-old young men are fighting and dying in this very hot and unfinished war against the terrorist Hezbollah entity, which is hell-bent on completing the slaughter of October 7th.

It is not only IDF soldiers being targeted, it’s also Israeli civilians who are still here in the sparsely inhabited north, where entire cities and kibbutzim are ghost towns. Whatever our government and the American administration are trying to sell the world, the reality is that the north of Israel has been left to its own fate for almost two and a half years, and that we are in a war of attrition with one of the Iranian regime’s terror proxy forces.

When I forced my way back into the IDF as a combat medic in October 2023, despite being very much aged out, I never dreamed I would still be serving today, more than two and a half years later!

I spent a lot of time in Lebanon decades ago during my regular army service as a Lone Soldier in the Givati Brigade, when the IDF maintained a security zone in southern Lebanon. Back then, every mission statement ended with the same sentence: “Our mission is to defend the northern communities.”

It is amazing how nothing seems to have changed in over two decades! The only way for a real and genuine peace to exist between Lebanon and Israel is to topple the regime that is funding and supporting the terrorist Hezbollah. As long as they exist, no matter whether or not you declare a ceasefire, there will never be true peace. One cannot appease evil. It must be destroyed for good to triumph.

Israel is fighting three wars currently, against Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. We must be allowed to win these wars. Because without a conclusive and unconditional victory, we will remain in this constant state of tension and will not be able to function psychologically or financially. The entire multi-billion-dollar tourism industry has been paralyzed for almost three years.

So, why do reservists like me keep on returning to fight this long war? We recognize that this is the right thing to do. We acknowledge that these are the values we were raised on. We feel it is an honor to serve our people and our country. We cannot say, “Let someone else do it,” if we did, nothing would get done. We realize that an existential threat hovers over our very existence. We understand that this is yet another war of no choice. We know that there are tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox draft evaders. We are fighting for our families. We are fighting for hearth and home. We are fighting for our people. We are fighting for our country. We are fighting for our beliefs and values. We are fighting for Western civilization. We are fighting for the forces of light and right.

We need to be able to conclusively defeat our foes and not have endless “ceasefires” that are not worth the paper they are written on. Like Nazi Germany, the Iranian terror regime and its proxies must be defeated for the sake of the future of the world.

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My latest book, Heroes of PALMAR, How One IDF Unit Revolutionised Combat Medicine in Gaza (Gefen:2026), is available on Amazon.com or Gefen.com.