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Shlomi Ben Yair reflects on complex recoveries in Gaza and Lebanon, missile destruction across Israeli cities, preparations for a major earthquake and the October 7 battles that shaped the Home Front Command\u2019s Rescue BrigadeFinal preparations were underway on the Home Front Command parade ground in Ramla for the 2025 outstanding soldiers ceremony.Capt. Ido, a company commander completing the officers\u2019 course, was excited. According to the schedule, at 6 p.m. he was to receive the rank of major from the commander of the Rescue and Training Brigade. An hour later, the Home Front Command chief was due to present him with an award of excellence.GalleryCol. Shlomi Ben Yair, commander of the Home Front Command\u2019s Rescue Brigade (Photo: Dana Kopel)His father, who lives in the United States, had come especially for the event.\u201cThen, at around 5 p.m., a senior officer from Southern Command called me,\u201d said Col. Shlomi Ben Yair, who completed his term as commander of the Rescue Brigade last week.\u201cHe told me, \u2018Listen, we have an extremely complicated incident in Khan Younis. A building collapsed because of an explosive device and one of the soldiers cannot be found. He is probably buried under the rubble.\u201c\u2018I\u2019m sending helicopters, and I need you to come with reinforcements. Bring one of your battalion commanders as well because this is the leading edge of the maneuver and there are no forces farther forward. We need strong command and control.\u2019\u201dBen Yair immediately mobilized the brigade\u2019s reconnaissance unit and a squad commanders\u2019 course, informed the Home Front Command chief\u2019s aide that he would not attend the awards ceremony and left his office for the helicopter landing pad.During Operation Rising Lion: Rescue Brigade soldiers at the missile impact site in Bat Yam (Video: IDF)\u201cOn the way, I met one of the lieutenant colonels and told him, \u2018I\u2019m flying to a rescue operation in Khan Younis. You give Ido his rank,\u2019\u201d he recalled.When Ben Yair reached the landing pad, Lt. Col. Yarden Shukron, then commander of the Home Front Command school, was already waiting. She had also volunteered to join the mission.\u201cI told her, \u2018Attach someone to me. I arrived without a command post,\u2019\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cAn officer came over wearing a vest and helmet and said, \u2018Hello, I\u2019m Ido, and I\u2019m attached to you.\u2019\u201cI looked at him and saw that it was the officer whose rank I was supposed to award that evening.\u201cI said, \u2018What are you doing here? You\u2019re receiving a promotion and an award tonight. Your father came from the United States.\u2019\u201cHe told me, \u2018Give me the rank in Khan Younis,\u2019 and boarded the helicopter with me.\u201dThey landed near the Gaza border and continued with forces from the IDF\u2019s 98th Division to the disaster site in central Khan Younis.A force from one of the Rescue Brigade\u2019s battalions, operating under the division as part of the ground maneuver, was already working at the scene.Ben Yair assumed command and led the complex recovery effort.Home Front Command forces operating during Operation Roaring Lion (Video: IDF)\u201cWe were in a combat zone. This was not the site of a missile strike in central Israel,\u201d he said.\u201cWe could not turn on floodlights because we would have been identified. We worked with night-vision equipment, used flashlights with red filters and covered openings in the remaining walls with blankets.\u201cThis was not a simple rescue where you say, \u2018Someone is here, lift the metal and pull him out.\u2019 It was genuine surgical work.\u201cAnd I looked at our male and female soldiers inside enemy territory and felt incredibly proud of them.\u201dAfter hours of work, the body of a Golani Brigade soldier killed in the explosion was found beneath the rubble and brought back to Israel for burial.Several weeks later, on June 15, 2025, during Operation Rising Lion, an Iranian missile struck Rehovot, the city where Ben Yair lives.\u201cIn one of the apartments that was hit, there was a Holocaust survivor in his 80s trapped beneath the rubble,\u201d he said.Home Front Command forces operate at the missile impact site in Rehovot (Photo: IDF)\u201cI was there as brigade commander, but the actual rescue was led by the deputy commander of one of my battalions together with a company commander, two reservists from the Home Front Command\u2019s national search-and-rescue unit and a doctor.\u201cThey worked for almost two hours to rescue him, and throughout the operation they held his hand.\u201cThey got him out alive.\u201dSome time later, Ben Yair received a message from the man\u2019s son.\u201cHe wrote, \u2018Tell everyone that you have heroic soldiers. My father said that while he was trapped under the rubble, he thought he would have preferred to die immediately in the strike rather than suffer.\u201c\u2018Only when he heard the voices of your angels arriving did he understand that he wanted to live. That gave him hope.\u2019\u201dBen Yair read the message aloud at the Rescue Brigade\u2019s change-of-command ceremony last Tuesday.Shortly afterward, he flew abroad with his wife, Mor, and their three children, a 13-year-old and 6-year-old twins, for 18 months of study at a foreign military national defense college.Rescue Brigade soldiers at the site of a direct hit by an Iranian missile in Beersheba (Photo: IDF)The stories from Khan Younis and Rehovot represent the Rescue Brigade\u2019s two roles, or more accurately, the two helmets worn by its personnel: the orange rescue helmet and the olive-colored infantry helmet.The infantry helmet is worn by the brigade\u2019s soldiers, around 60% of whom are women, during operations in Gaza and Lebanon and during deployments in the West Bank.\u201cOnly yesterday, my reconnaissance unit was in Lebanon as part of an operation by the 36th Division that I cannot discuss,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cI will never forget the first time one of our teams crossed the international border during the first round of fighting with Hezbollah. I joined them as brigade commander.\u201dThe rescue helmet was worn at missile impact sites during both rounds of fighting with Iran, Operation Rising Lion and Operation Roaring Lion.Ben Yair remembers the first night of Iranian missile fire during Rising Lion in precise detail.\u201cThe first incident was on Tirtza Street in Ramat Gan,\u201d he said.\u201cI had a Rescue Brigade battalion there operating under the Tel Aviv District.\u201cIt was unlike anything we had seen before.\u201cDuring Operation Shield and Arrow, six months before October 7, a Hamas rocket struck a building in Rehovot. At the time, I commanded the Home Front Command\u2019s Jerusalem and Central District.\u201cIt was a serious incident, with one person killed and quite a few wounded. But the damage was localized.\u201cYou are given an address, you arrive and see the building that was hit, while the surrounding buildings are almost intact.\u201dThe scene in Ramat Gan was entirely different.The morning after the Ramat Gan strike at the start of Operation Rising Lion. 'We evacuated residents from homes within a 300-meter radius' (\u05e6\u05d9\u05dc\u05d5\u05dd: \u05de\u05d5\u05d8\u05d9 \u05e7\u05de\u05d7\u05d9)\u201cAs I began approaching the site, I saw many broken shutters and walls with holes,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cI told my driver, \u2018Stop. This is the incident.\u2019\u201cThe battalion commander told me on the phone, \u2018No, keep driving. You are still far from the impact site.\u2019\u201cWe drove another few hundred meters and saw half-destroyed buildings. I said, \u2018All right, the missile hit here.\u2019\u201cIt turned out that it had not. We still had not arrived.\u201cThat is when you understand the surrounding damage. It was like an earthquake.\u201cWe evacuated residents from homes within a 300-meter radius of the impact point.\u201cA missile like that hits and tears apart everything around it.\u201dWhile dealing with the Ramat Gan strike, Ben Yair received a report that another missile had hit a residential high-rise on Leonardo da Vinci Street in Tel Aviv.The Iranian missile strike on the Da Vinci Towers in Tel Aviv (Photo: Ido Erez)\u201cAt neither that site nor Ramat Gan was I the commander of the overall incident,\u201d he explained.\u201cEach scene had a district commander from the Tel Aviv District responsible for that sector.\u201cBut one of my battalions was present at each location.\u201cSo I assisted the district commander and battalion commander in any way I could, participated in their situation assessments, went inside with them and also personally rescued people.\u201cAt the da Vinci site, we climbed on foot to the 44th floor, broke through doors and rescued people from protected rooms.\u201dBen Yair, 43, held every command position in the Home Front Command\u2019s regular rescue companies, even before the brigade was created and before the first battalion was established.\u201cI enlisted in 2001 in the Combat Engineering Corps, Battalion 605,\u201d he said.Col. Ben Yair: 'I\u2019m the brigade\u2019s longest-serving member. Even the senior NCOs were once my recruits' (Photo: IDF)\u201cI completed my first position as a platoon commander, and then they called many of us, commanders from combat units, and told us, \u2018We are establishing the 669 of the ground. A rescue commando unit. We want you in the new unit.\u2019\u201cBut two hours later, when they realized it belonged to the Home Front Command, almost everyone ran away.\u201cOnly a handful remained who were genuinely interested, and I was one of them.\u201dBen Yair became a platoon commander in the Home Front Command\u2019s first regular rescue company.\u201cI was the only one who came from Combat Engineering,\u201d he said.\u201cI had two squad commanders who came from Golani. They were troublemakers.\u201cOn the train home, they would take off the orange beret and put on Golani\u2019s brown beret.\u201dTwo additional regular rescue companies were later established.Only in 2008 did then-Home Front Command chief Yair Golan decide to turn them into a battalion.Home Front Command forces during Operation Rising Lion. 'Before this, we had no local incidents to draw on. That changed' (Photo: IDF)Ben Yair, who had already completed a term as company commander, was appointed operations officer of the first regular battalion, Shahar.\u201cAfter that, three more battalions were established: Kedem, Tavor and Ram,\u201d he said.\u201cAbout a year ago, we began forming the fifth regular battalion, Ari.\u201dIn his next role, as head of the rescue section at the Home Front Command training base, Ben Yair joined the IDF aid delegation sent to Haiti following the devastating earthquake that killed nearly a quarter of a million people.\u201cIt was an event unlike anything before it, and I hope there will never be anything like it again,\u201d he said.A major earthquake could also happen in Israel. How are you preparing?\u201cI grew up in Safed, the epicenter of the major 1927 earthquake, and they say an event like that can occur once every 100 years,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cAfter the earthquake in Turkey in February 2023, a delegation of senior officers traveled there for a study tour.\u201cI was already a district commander at the time.\u201cThe Home Front Command chief, who was with us, said, \u2018Friends, this is not missiles. This is something completely different.\u2019\u201cAnyone who has participated in Home Front Command aid delegations abroad, and I have taken part in several, understands the meaning.\u201cI do not think any country is genuinely prepared for an earthquake on the scale of Haiti or Turkey.\u201cBut the Home Front Command and the local authorities deal with it extensively. We train and prepare as much as possible.\u201dBen Yair continued advancing through the ranks and positions: deputy commander of the brigade training base, commander of the advanced training program, deputy commander and later commander of Ram Battalion, and commander of the training base at Zikim.\u201cAs battalion commander, we spent almost two consecutive years on operational deployment in the West Bank,\u201d he said.Between assignments, he completed a bachelor\u2019s degree and attended the IDF Command and Staff College.In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he was appointed commander of the Home Front Command\u2019s Jerusalem and Central District.As district commander, he was also responsible for the Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony at Mount Herzl and other official military ceremonies held in the capital.\u201cThat was the first position that took me completely outside the Rescue Brigade,\u201d he said.\u201cMy entire service had been in the brigade\u2019s battalions, even before the brigade itself was established in 2013.\u201cI am the most veteran person here. Even the senior noncommissioned officers were once my recruits.\u201dIn September 2023, Ben Yair was appointed operations officer of the Home Front Command.One month later came the earthquake no one had anticipated: the October 7 attack.\u201cAs operations officer, you are responsible for all force activation in the command, as well as the warning operations room,\u201d he said.\u201cSo at 6:29 a.m., I began receiving alerts from across the country.\u201cI left home, arrived at the operations room and began mobilizing the command.\u201cMaj. Gen. Rafi Milo also arrived, and we tried to build a situational picture.\u201cFrom the home-front perspective, our central concern during those hours was rocket fire from Gaza.\u201dVideos of terrorists in the Gaza border communities began appearing.\u201cBut there was Southern Command and the Gaza Division, which were supposed to deal with that,\u201d he said.\u201cThen we began receiving phone calls from the training base at Zikim and the Southern District headquarters at Urim, both of which are our bases, and we understood that terrorists were attacking them.\u201dAlthough both belonged to the Home Front Command, they were located in the Gaza Division\u2019s area of responsibility.Top row: Adir Meir Abudi, Or Moses, Yannai Kaminka and Adar Ben Simon; bottom row, left to right: Omri Niv Firshtein, Neria Aharon Nagari and Eden Alon Levy (Photo: IDF)\u201cI called Southern Command operations officer Efraim Avni and said, \u2018Brother, there are terrorists at Zikim. Can you send reinforcements?\u2019\u201cHe told me, \u2018Listen, right now we are dealing only with the communities. Do not talk to me about military bases.\u2019\u201dHeroic battles were fought at both bases.Seven Home Front Command soldiers were killed at each site, 14 in total.\u201cA year later, when I became Rescue and Training Brigade commander, I was responsible for investigating the battle at Zikim Camp,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cReinforcements eventually arrived, but only at a later stage.\u201cThe people who managed to stop the two Nukhba platoons that raided the base were members of the Rescue and Training Brigade, male and female commanders who fought until their final bullet.\u201dSix of the seven people killed in the battle were commanders.They were company commander Maj. Adir Meir Abudi; deputy company commander Capt. Or Moses; platoon commanders Lt. Yannai Kaminka and Lt. Adar Ben Simon; recruit squad commander Staff Sgt. Eden Alon Levy; command-post soldier Staff Sgt. Omri Niv Firshtein; and recruit Neria Aharon Nagari, who also fought courageously.\u201cEach one of them has a story you could discuss for hours,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cIt begins with Adir, the company commander, sending an order on WhatsApp: \u2018All recruits back, commanders forward.\u2019\u201cThat is what decided the battle.\u201cYou hear Or Moses giving orders over the radio after he was killed. It was like Avigdor Kahalani\u2019s radio commands during the Yom Kippur War.\u201cThe two platoon commanders ran between the positions, pushed the soldiers back and took their places.\u201cAdar fought there for hours until she was killed.\u201cOmri Niv, a 20-year-old kid, saw his friend Noa Ze\u2019evi get shot in the eye, ran toward her to save her and was killed.\u201dDespite the heavy price, Ben Yair said, they completed their mission.\u201cOnly one terrorist out of dozens managed to enter the base, and he was also killed. All the others fled or were killed.\u201cAs a senior IDF officer, I am ashamed of the October 7 failure.\u201cBut as commander of the Rescue and Training Brigade, I am proud of these heroes, even though I had not yet entered the position.\u201cThey are an inseparable part of the brigade\u2019s heritage.\u201cEach march in the training track is dedicated to one of those killed in the battle at Zikim.\u201dA poster bearing their photographs hangs on the wall at the entrance to Ben Yair\u2019s office in Ramla.Beneath it is an empty bag of Tapuchips bearing an image of a female officer in a combat vest, holding a weapon and wearing an orange beret.\u201cIn memory of Capt. Or Moses, who fought heroically while defending her soldiers at the Zikim base on October 7, 2023,\u201d reads the white lettering on the special-edition potato-chip bag.Yanai Kaminka\u2019s family and friends commemorated him with individual packages of Elite black coffee bearing his photograph and a summary of his heroism.\u201cYanai would walk around the guard posts and make coffee for his soldiers,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cI had perhaps 300 such packages here in the office.\u201cEvery time someone came for an interview or work meeting, I would take out a packet, make coffee and say a few words about Yanai.\u201cIt is a shame. I would have made you one, but they are all gone.\u201dIn August 2024, Ben Yair completed his term as Home Front Command operations officer and became commander of the Rescue and Training Brigade.With his departure, the unit is being divided into two: the Rescue Brigade, commanded by Col. Asher Benishti, and the Training Brigade, commanded by Col. Yarden Shukron.(Photo: IDF)\u201cDuring my two years as brigade commander, I had nine units under my command, more than any regular brigade,\u201d Ben Yair said.They included five operational battalions, Shahar, Kedem, Ram, Tavor and Ari; the training base at Zikim, which conducts basic, initial and advanced training and also serves as an operational battalion; the Home Front Command school in Ramla, responsible for squad commanders\u2019 courses, officers\u2019 course completion programs and rescue instructor courses; the command training base at Zikim, which trains all Home Front Command reserve battalions; the Matakhim Unit, responsible for securing the Nuclear Research Center in Dimona; and another classified unit.\u201cI had 10 lieutenant colonels under me, including the deputy brigade commander,\u201d he said.\u201cIt is tremendous fun commanding so many people.\u201cBut in a position paper I submitted to the commanding general, I proposed creating a separate training organization.\u201cNow I am transferring the Home Front Command school and command training base to Yarden. They will no longer be part of the Rescue Brigade.\u201dThe Swords of Iron War, Ben Yair said, was the first in which Rescue Brigade battalions participated fully in ground maneuvers in Gaza and Lebanon.\u201cEvery maneuvering division had one of our battalions entering with it, going out on missions and participating in operations,\u201d he said.\u201cKedem Battalion was sent to dismantle Shifa Hospital in Gaza because they knew we would have to break through concrete walls and locked doors and expose tunnels while trying to locate hostages.\u201cShahar Battalion, commanded by Yarden, entered as an infantry force under the 162nd Division.\u201cIt fought on the way to the objective, killed terrorists and then carried out its specialized mission.\u201cAnd I remind you that these are mixed battalions of men and women.\u201d(Photo: IDF)The brigade once maintained an \u201cextreme team\u201d in every rescue battalion for extraction incidents during a maneuver.\u201cToday, the rescue battalions are an inseparable part of the maneuvering divisions,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cI was at a difficult incident in Lebanon involving a dead soldier trapped beneath 60 tons of concrete.\u201cThe battalion engineer and I tried to understand how to extract him.\u201cIt was the most surgical rescue possible, with gunfire and shelling all around us.\u201cOne day, several couples who are friends met, and a woman asked whether I knew soldiers from Golani.\u201cI asked whom she meant. She gave me the name of a relative who had been killed in a building collapse.\u201cI got chills. I had been part of his recovery.\u201dWhether in Gaza, Lebanon, Bat Yam or Ramat Gan, the Rescue Brigade\u2019s central mission is saving lives.\u201cAs we sit here talking, I have two active-duty female officers and four reserve officers with the aid delegation responding to the earthquake in Venezuela,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cWhen Operation Rising Lion began, all my battalions were replaced in their combat sectors within a minute and a half and returned to the home front.\u201cBy Operation Roaring Lion we arrived with enormous experience and five battalions, each assigned to one of the Home Front Command districts.\u201cUntil recently, when teaching a rescue soldier in training, you would say, \u2018During the Haiti earthquake, we did this. In Turkey, we saw that. This commander was in Mexico, that commander was in Nepal.\u2019\u201cWe had no local incidents on which to base the training.\u201cThat changed during Roaring Lion.\u201cThe Home Front Command underwent an extraordinary learning process that was reflected during Roaring Lion.\u201dAt the missile impact site in Beit Shemesh during Rising Lion, where eight civilians were killed, Ben Yair sent the officers\u2019 course, around 60 soldiers.\u201cI told them, \u2018Help with whatever is needed, do not interfere and afterward each of you will tell your soldiers the story of Beit Shemesh,\u2019\u201d he said.\u201cAt one stage, the district commander responsible for the site asked them to help locate body parts, and they did extraordinary work.\u201dOn Saturday night, March 21, 2026, two Iranian missiles struck Dimona and Arad, causing enormous damage.Fortunately, no one was killed.\u201cRam Battalion handled both incidents,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cTwo days earlier, on Thursday, I visited their companies in Arad and Dimona.\u201cThe soldiers were frustrated because nothing had happened there since the operation began.\u201cIn the end, they want to be in the action.\u201cI told them, \u2018Listen carefully. You are in an area under a lethal threat. It is simply well protected, but sooner or later something will happen here.\u2019\u201cOn Saturday night, when the missiles hit Arad and Dimona, I flew there by helicopter with reinforcements.\u201cOne of the soldiers in the field, who had been with me during the conversation two days earlier, told me, \u2018Brigade commander, you gave us the evil eye. You said something would happen here, and it did.\u2019\u201dIn all the cases you described, your battalions operated under the Home Front Command districts, even when you were present in the field. Were there incidents you commanded directly as brigade commander?\u201cThere is a scenario in which I, as brigade commander, assume command of an area struck by a missile with a regular battalion and a reserve battalion, similar to a brigade combat team during a ground maneuver,\u201d Ben Yair said.\u201cWe practiced it several times.\u201cAt the missile impact site on Leonardo da Vinci Street in Tel Aviv, they almost activated us as a brigade headquarters, but ultimately there was no need.\u201cI prepare the battalions, train them, send them wherever they are needed and remain with them at the incident site, even when I am not its commander.\u201dAlongside their life-saving missions on the front and home front, Ben Yair is proud of the brigade\u2019s work in the West Bank.\u201cWe are now operating in places we did not enter before,\u201d he said.\u201cWe go inside refugee camps and participate in special operations alongside Yamam or Duvdevan.\u201cThere is no brigade-level operation in the West Bank today in which my battalions do not participate as full infantry forces.\u201cThe West Bank Division fights to get us.\u201cIt is like the old Kfir Brigade.\u201cToday, when Kfir is maneuvering, we do their work.\u201dWe met one day before Ben Yair completed his command.Until the last moment, however, he did not know whether the change-of-command ceremony would take place as scheduled or be delayed because of tensions with Iran and fears that fighting might resume.Ultimately, it was not postponed.\u201cBefore you arrived, I was sitting here for a briefing with my battalion commanders,\u201d he said.\u201cLast night, at a farewell event, they laughed that every Trump post activates my brigade.\u201cThey told me, \u2018At the moment, the change-of-command ceremony is taking place as planned.\u2019\u201cThe emphasis was on \u2018at the moment.\u2019\u201dThe ceremony did take place.Several days later, the Ben Yair family boarded the plane.I asked what he would do if fighting with Iran resumed while he was studying abroad.Ben Yair did not hesitate.\u201cI will take the first flight back to Israel.\u201d" ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787696847.260644", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T22:29:42.337304+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "60", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/hydip4osge" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T22:29:42.332861+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "'When a missile like that hits, it tears apart everything around it. 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