How does a soldier recover from a crippling terrorist attack? What is the reality of life on Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah-filled Lebanon?
David “Dudi” Lev was serving as a reservist, helping Israel Defense Forces (IDF) guard his northern Israeli village from potential Hezbollah invasion, when a terrorist missile attack severely wounded and nearly killed him. Missiles destroyed over half of his village, Metula. As a reservist fighting to protect his home from the multiple outposts of Hezbollah terrorists right across the border from Metula, Lev had to face the horrors of genocidal terrorism on a daily basis. He is even now working through his intense mental trauma, and his son is still on the front lines.
Lev told me that on June 23, 2024, sometime around nine o’clock in the evening, “we [Metula defense brigade] had a mission to escort the family that came to our village.” The family came from the mountain neighborhood, and their home got hit “with the two anti-tank missiles, and the family wanted to come to see if there is something precious to save from home,” he explained. “That family was evacuated from the seventh of October from the village. And they were many, many months somewhere around Israel, located in hotels, and we got the mission to escort them up to the mountain, and while they will be at home trying to save precious things [to] them, we were supposed to give them some kind of lookout.”
Read Lev’s Oct. 7 Memories: Exclusive: Israeli Reservist Describes Oct. 7 and Hezbollah Strikes on Northern Border
So Lev and his fellow fighters prepared for a mission where they’d be monitoring if Hezbollah was firing as the family were inside their home. If Hezbollah spied a “movement and they are shooting missiles, and then we [are] supposed to shout [to the family] and give them something between four or five minutes to run inside the shelter, because in Israel, [and] specifically in Metula, every home has its own room that serves you as a shelter,” Lev added.
The defense brigade soldiers met the family at the village gate and debriefed them on the expected danger, Lev continued, “and we were driving up to the neighborhood in a tactical open light car… me and my friend, and we were the first one, the first car that goes up to the mountain.”
60 Minutes drove up to the Israeli-Lebanon border, where there are near-daily missile attacks from Hezbollah. In the partly destroyed Israeli town of Metula, the handful of remaining residents spend their days in an underground bunker complex. https://t.co/9Lm3JVMaqS pic.twitter.com/Qh8FChkQO2
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 12, 2024
But Hezbollah started firing before they reached shelter. “And then we [are] caught inside the anti-tank missile ambush. They shot at us. The missile hit something like five meters from our car, and I got all the explosion, all the blast on me. I got hit very, very, very hard. I was in a severe, critical situation,” Lev described the nightmarish scene.
He received “huge damage in my left leg, my right arm, all of my belly got exploded. In this event, I lost my one of my eyes. I lost one of my ears,” he said, and “all the car got flipped and crashed on us because of the explosion.” The blast propelled his friend out of the car, but the man quickly returned to the near-fatal wreck “and pulled me out of the car and laid me down in a small channel that has been the other side of the car, and he called for help,” Lev told me.
Others of the brigade came but they could only risk “light cars, that will not be any too much attraction for a second attack on us,” because Islamic terrorists particularly target ambulances and the like. The brigade members drove Lev down to the village and “then they took me, evacuated me …from Metula to the nearest town called Katzrin, put me up on a chopper and moved me to Rambam hospital.” That hospital had to move underground during Iranian missile attacks this year.
Lev explained that he was hospitalized for four and a half months, “and since then I left the hospital. I'm in rehabilitation now in Haifa, a place called the Warrior House, there are a few of them spreading around Israel. And then… five days a week in physical rehabilitation and mental rehabilitation.” He finds the mental rehabilitation “very hard, because this is my second time in the military that I getting wounded. Thirty years ago, when I was a young soldier in my special [commando] unit, I got hit by a terrorist in …a Palestinian city.”
In that attack several decades ago, Lev “was in hospital for a period of time, too, and now that's my second time that I'm getting wounded, and this — this one is even harder than the first one, much more,” he emphasized.
He is very grateful for the Warrior House. In the hospital he didn't receive mental rehabilitation, he felt in “shock” and he “could not talk, could not [have] the relationship with my family, with my mom, my sister, my kids. I'm living alone, but I have three kids, and two of them are serving in the military,” Lev described his difficult situation. “Two of them are combat soldiers. My daughter was a combat soldier, and now she moved to another position in intelligence, and my son now is a combat soldier in the Golani Infantry Brigade. He's still serving the Gaza Strip.” Israeli soldiers are now withdrawing from Gaza.
Lev stated emphatically, “The mental treatment that I'm going through is something that I can almost say saved my life, because without it, I don't know if I could come back and join life again, I think I would probably stay somehow at home, trying not to leave and not go out of my apartment. Right now, in [the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF)]-funded clinic, I have a mental treatment with a guy called Michal,” who is a “lifesaver,” Lev said.
Michal helped Lev recognize and analyze his trauma, discovering what Lev said are “three mental issues that comes with me from my injury, three boxes of PTSD. One of them is my injury. Whatever happened there, lying there in the darkness, the blast, losing my eyesight, everything that's involved with that. My second issue with my PTSD, because of my injuries, all the process of the evacuation and the period of time that I've been in hospital.”
This is particularly difficult for Lev because, he told me, “before my injury, I was very strong man. My friends used to call me like… in the USA, the D9 Caterpillar bulldozer.” He had a similar nickname in Hebrew. “And from being that strong man to being someone that four and a half months needed to be showered and needed to be taken to [the] toilet,” it was a crushing situation for him.
He ended, “My third and last issue that I'm dealing with with my PTSD is a process that we are calling it self-grief, losing myself, losing all of my capabilities, my physical capabilities, and stuff like that, and just being able to talk about it is something that happened only because of those mental treatments.” Lev is still in a “long, long process,” but he is hopeful he can end his “rehabilitation period of time, and my hopes for the future for myself, I want to buy a camera. I want to buy a four-wheel drive, and just be able to tour a little bit in Israel and take a picture of… everything that is beautiful. And there's lots of beautiful things to see in Israel.”
No matter how horrific his experience with the terrorist attack in Metula and all the other loss and danger, Lev is more in love than ever with his home nation. “I told you that the seventh of October, we fought literally for our home,” he stated. “All of Israel is our home, a very small country. And as much as I'm crazy about Metula, my village, I'm crazy about all of Israel, and I want to explore this country … from bottom to top.”
God bless David Lev and his family as they rebuild their lives in the Holy Land, which God gave to the Israelites millennia ago (Genesis 17:8).
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