Results for “Sayeret Tzanhanim”

…y exercises, and my nightly stock-taking, I'd somehow missed an obvious detail in our planning. When we got back to the sayeret base, Avraham was waiting for us. “Well?” he asked Meir. “They don’t need me,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.” It was not just a source of reas...

…an. There was still a core of ministers opposed: chiefly Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, but also Boogie Ya’alon, a former Sayeret Matkal commander and chief of staff who Minister of Strategic Affairs. But the confidence and detail with which the plan was laid out, and the fact that...

…could see that four of the young men were dead. Another was fighting for his life. Several others were also wounded. A sayeret medic and several senior officers were trying to save the most badly injured man, but I knew I needed to get military doctors and medical evacuation hel...

…emed to have evaporated. I looked into several of the rooms where, months earlier, I’d run through operational plans as sayeret commander. Inside each, a large wall map traced the course of the fighting. Israeli forces were marked in blue, the Syrians and Egyptians in red, with a...

…ence. “You need to send us,” I said. I tried to persuade him that if it came down to an operation to free our hostages, Sayeret Matkal offered the best hope that it would not end in a bloodbath. We had the mind-set, the background, the training and now the experience. I also knew...

…hether it would be operationally possible to dismantle Tel Rumeida and remove the settlers. I said yes, by sending in a Sayeret Matkal force after midnight, as long as news of the operation did not leak ahead of time. “We'll take over the area, close it off and get control.” Give...

… head of military intelligence; Gadi Zohar, in charge of civil administration for the West Bank and Gaza; my own former sayeret deputy, Danny Yatom, who was head of the central command; and Rabin’s military aide, Kuti Mor. Also included were longtime political and media aide Eita...

…y nickname, Cheetah, he was in charge of the air force’s main helicopter squadron. He had flown both me and Nechemia on sayeret missions into the Sinai. Several days after the war was over, before returning to university, I drove up to Jerusalem to see his family. Cheetah was at...

…ion had been ordered to take control over the hills south of the Tovlano Triangle. One of its brigades, led by a former Sayeret Matkal soldier named Nachman Rifkind, was sent to take up a position immediately south of the triangle. Soon after nightfall, Rifkind radioed in that he...

…orthern command. They had set up a rooftop observation post just a few hundred yards in from where I had landed with my Sayeret Matkal team a decade earlier for the Rue Verdun operation. It overlooked a pair of Palestinian refugee camps: Sabra and, a couple of hundred yards close...

…hnology, invention and engineering. In a sense, this was the macroscopic equivalent of one of the guiding principles of Sayeret Matkal: brains, not just brawn. While cost-saving wasn’t the catalyst, I did realize that a change in strategy would mean a change in how we allocated...

…all of the C-130s were already airborne, it was only then that he gave the mission the final go-ahead. As commander of Sayeret Matkal, Pd always found running an operation from a command post hugely frustrating. This was even worse. Once we got word the Israeli force was on the...

…as being given the opportunity to apply everything I’d experienced and learned in the army, from the day I first joined Sayeret Matkal as an 18-year-old, to improve the security and safeguard the future of Israel. I know that sounds corny. But, while the momentum toward war in Ir...

…eration. We had no formal ties with the Mossad, but our intelligence work occasionally overlapped. In mid-December, the sayeret’s intelligence liaison was approached with a “theoretical question” by a couple of guys from the Mossad. Did we have the capability to attack three sepa...

… — Israeli forces on the Golan, at enormous cost, had managed to turn back the Syrian attack. In this war, the men from Sayeret Matkal were not bystanders. Most of the unit joined the fightback in the north, where, under Yoni Netanyahu’s command, they took on and defeated a Syria...