Captain Elkana Cohens First Hand Account of October 7
Summary
➡ The speaker recounts a violent conflict in Israel, where terrorists infiltrated the country, causing chaos and killing innocent people. The speaker and his wife, both military personnel, were called to action. Despite the danger, they fought against the terrorists, protecting their country and its people. The speaker emphasizes the brutality of the terrorists and the courage of those who stood against them.
➡ The speaker discusses the challenges faced in combat, where civilians often support and hide weapons for Hamas terrorists, making it difficult to distinguish between friend and foe. Despite these difficulties, the speaker emphasizes the importance of avoiding harm to civilians. The speaker also highlights the need to bring back hostages and the ongoing fight against terrorism, which they believe is not just Israel’s fight, but a fight for the western world. The speaker’s experiences and insights have been recognized by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and they hope their story can help others understand the complexities of their situation.
Transcript
And that book, appropriately enough, is titled October 7. Welcome, Kuno, to on Watch. Thank you, Chris, for having me. Thank you very much. It’s a great pleasure. You’ve got strong support from judicial watch and from literally millions of our supporters here in the United States for how Israel is defending itself from a brutal, horrific terror attack. October 7, we’re almost up to the anniversary. We’re about a month out, eleven months in from, I mean, arguably an attack, a vicious terrorist attack on scale or on par, actually worse than proportionally our own attacks back on 911. 20, I guess now 23 years ago.
Kuno, first of all, I want to get an understanding of your professional experience as an officer, as a soldier in the IDF. How is it that you came to be a commando and came to be a commissioned officer? Yes. So first of all, thank you for having me. It’s a privilege for me. Thank you. And it’s great to know that we have that support. It’s mean a lot. So thank you for that. You asked me how I became a command officer. So in Israel, first of all, it’s important to understand that every teenager, while he finished high school, he’s drafting into the army.
It’s everyone. So you basically finish your high school, you can do a gap year or something like that. But after you’re finishing high school, you’re drafting into the army. And then it’s divided to different sections. You can go through just to regular fighting unit or the intelligence or etcetera or whatever. Yeah, yeah. But if we are focusing on the fighting combat unit, there is the regular division and this is, you’re not choosing those division, you’re getting choose. Sometimes you can say what do you prefer? But this is mostly, it’s a random thing where you’re going to find yourself and then you have the special unit.
And in the special unit you need to do physical mental test. It starts with a draft drafting into those units, and it starts with a one week of a test that takes for one week, physical, mental, also social, to understand who are you and how can you deal with, you know, and then after you finish that week, you’re getting into a training course of. It depends which unit. But in my unit, it’s. It’s one I started in a. In a different unit named Chaldag. It’s a Kingfisher unit, one of the elite unit in there in the army, which is training for one year and eight months of training.
And just after you finish one year, in eight months, you become a fighter. After me serving there for almost one year, I broke my hands, and I was debating rather to stay in the same unit or just to move to another one. You’re going to be a recycle. Yeah. So I said, like, you know, I just, I’m going to give up on that one and I’m going to move to a different. A different unit, which I’m proud to be part of. Dove Devon unit. And for those who watched faudae on Netflix, that theory based on my unit.
So I did another one year and four months of training, and I finished my course, and then I became a fighter. A fighter in my unit. Right. And then the commanders of the unit choosing who are the people that they think that will be the best. And in order to be officer. And I went into officer schools, and this is how I found myself in the commander. That’s a lot of training. That’s a lot of dedication on your part. Many Americans who have military service or military experience and their families will appreciate the selection process for people going into very elite fighting units.
And whether in the american army, whether it’s paratroopers or army Rangers, this is a very difficult, very difficult selection process just to even be chosen, let alone then going on and completing the training. It’s a long process, and so you have to be very dedicated and then again, to be selected for a leadership position to go to an officer candidate school. It says a lot about you. It says a lot about your strength and your character, and it’s a very fine recommendation, obviously, for all that you’ve done. Thank you. But I think it says a lot about my roots, about my parents.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I was well educated, but I think it’s regard them, but thank you. Yeah. None of this stuff happens by accident. Right. There’s a lot of ingredients. There’s a lot of different parts that come together. So it’s your parents, it’s your family, it’s your community, and it’s you. So it’s a lot of things, but so you find yourself as a commando officer, and then, I mean, what is your. As a reserve officer, though? You’re operating as a reserve. What are you doing in your regular civilian life when you’re not on active duty? Thank you for asking.
So I’m a newlywed and expecting father, a personal trainer and a student. And last thing that I want to do to participate war. Believe me, I would like to join with my wife and my family. But unfortunately, that day I got called because we heard what happened on October 7. And soon I will explain everything. But you were right to mention that I’m on reserve. I’m not on active duty. I’m reserved. And also my wife, while we’re talking, she is also doing reserve. And I met my wife in my base. She was part of my unit.
And this is how we met. That’s great. Now some soldiers are much better looking than other soldiers. That’s wonderful. So the Israeli Defense Force is not like the american army. We have a large standing army and we have reserve forces that are periodically called up, but not very often, but they are occasionally rotated. But the IDF is different. You have a very large reserve force, and they’re very often are called onto active duty. It’s a different structure, right? Yeah. The last year I’ve been called, I did my reserve duty for over the 240 days. Of course, this is nothing unusual.
I closed my business that day because I was needed to change everything in my life. But I think we have a great cause to fight for, and we all understand that. So we’re putting our private things aside in order to fight for our country. Right? So October 7 happens. It’s early morning hours, I guess, is when you find out that this attack has taken place. It’s obviously a huge surprise attack, which I find, I guess those are tough questions, right? How could this happen? How could you be surprised? That’s kind of a second question. But the first question is, what do you do? You’re obviously called to active duty immediately.
You have to go to your unit, and then what are your priorities? What are your orders? Right away. So on October 7, first of all, you ask, how did it happen? We failed that day. We felt that day. And unfortunately, I don’t know what’s happened. I think that we were just blind. But I’m putting that aside. 1 second. On October 7, I was sleeping in my in laws. It was a holiday in 530. In the morning, my wife Shiran, she woke me up, and she told me, 530, it’s 1 hour before everything started. And she woke up terrified.
And she told me that she had a nightmare of hundreds of terrorists were chasing us, and I couldn’t use my gun in order to defend herself. I hugged her back and I told her I also maybe even laughed. I told her, don’t worry, nothing will happen. And we both went back to sleep. But then 1 hour later, I was awakened by the iron dome system that were activated by the missile and the rockets that were shooting from Gaza towards entire the state of Israel. We are living in the central of Israel. We are living in Rohanana, it’s a small city next to Tel Aviv.
And I was awakened by. From that side run, and I understood that we’re going through some serious thing because it’s never coming from nowhere, and that suddenly in the middle of a holiday, I was waking up by those sirens. So I ran into my house, which is 510 minutes running away. I opened my phone, which usually is an observed job, not using phone during holidays. But I opened my phone, I called my commander, and I tried to understand what’s going on. He told me something big happening right now in the south. Make sure to prepare your equipment, and we will be in touch.
And while me talking to him and hanging up the phone call, I got another phone call, my friends from Inh, who told me that my wife, Chiron, was called up as well. So I understood that me and my wife during holiday, getting called up. But I can tell you that no question, no hesitation, we knew exactly what we needed to do, and we post drove to our base right away. So from being called up to the point where your unit is actually ordered into ground combat, urban combat in Gaza, how many days was that? There were three weeks between the breach on October 7 till the grounded maneuver of the IDF, because the first week was fighting inside Israel against those terrorists who were.
It’s important for people to understand there was breaching. They breached our border and they slaughtered innocent people. Their only set were dancing at a festival, music or subdivid, celebrating holiday with their family. Right? So we were fighting against those terrorists. And then three weeks later, we entered the Gaza Strip. Right? So that period in between, though, there were, I’m guessing, at least hundreds of these Hamas terrorists who had infiltrated into Israel. They made this initial attack, they slaughtered people, women and children. But then some of them, I guess, actually went underground and stayed and operated in Israel, and continued violence, sabotage, acts of terror.
You know, after theso, there’s October 7, but there’s days afterwards where they’re still operating underground in Israel. And I don’t think there’s necessarily a good understanding. People know that it took three weeks, almost a month, for the ground invasion. But you had an internal defense problem, you had an internal effort to identify people, subversives, sabotage killers still operating in Israel. Definitely. Just let me correct with one fact. It wasn’t hundred was thousands of terrorists that invaded that day. I think it was close to 3000. Right. But I mean, the ones that were. That stayed in Israel, though.
That’s what I meant. With a smaller number. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, they brutally murdered people. And unfortunately, some of the people cannot be recognized till now. They can find them. Not because they’re hostages, because they burn their body to the ashes, they put babies into ovens, they slaughtered people. The world should understand their cruelty. You know, people just trying to protest against the IDF and against the state of Israel. What exactly are you, you know, what are you exactly supporting? Are you rewarding. Rewarding terror? Like, what is that? Right? I mean, I think that everyone needs, especially right now, with the strange decisions and strange actions of Biden and Harris.
We have to remember what happened on October 7. We have to remember that hostages are still held. Hostages are executed while they supposedly are having negotiations. And now any effort to suddenly turn everything upside down and say Israel is wrong for pressing against terrorists. It’s like they’ve forgotten what happened on October 7. It’s that they’ve forgotten that there’s still hostages held. How can you be in a position to support the people that are doing this? It doesn’t make sense. It’s crazy. It is crazy. And while we’re talking, we still have 101 brother and sister in captivity and the dungeons of Hamas.
And I want you said before that in terms of us, that what happened on October 7 was bigger than the 911. Just want to tell you how much bigger was it? Yeah, it was 253 people were kidnapped and 1200 people were slaughtered. Which in terms of the US, it means that five. It’s 7500 people were kidnapped, 36,000 people were slaughtered. That’s a very good number. That’s a very good proportion to explain the difference or the impact of the attack. It’s very important. Yeah. So, you know, people supporting. And just few days ago, a week ago, we got another reminder of our cruelty enemy, which they killed.
Those six lovely people. I wanted to say their names because for me, it’s important that people will remember their name. Amen. So their. So their name was Oridanino. Carmel Gat, Alexander Levanov, Almog Sarusi, Eden Yushalmi and Hirsch Goldberg Pauling, which is us citizen, as you know, they always great people. And if someone want to understand who hamas actually killing, I highly recommend them to watch Hirsch mom funeral speech about him. It’s a new you. It’s in English. It’s available for everyone just to understand. He was a lovely guy and they just brutally killed him and shot him.
After 330 days of being in captivity. After he was, he lost his arm because they threw a grenade on him. And 330 days just do any efforts to be alive, to somehow to manage to be rescued, but then they decided to shoot him. These are the people that were dealing with. It’s a brutality that is anytime I hear, oh, we have to have sensitivity, we have to have understanding, you know, why can Israel keep putting so much pressure? That’s the reason you put pressure, because you have people that are outside, they are so outside law. They are so outside of basic human dignity and conduct.
You have no choice but to defend yourselves. I don’t buy any of the people who are trying to reverse the story because they’re losing now you have to stop. It’s crazy. That makes no sense. So your book, I know it’s a firsthand. It’s a firsthand narrative. It’s your experience. Almost like a diary, right? It is a diary, yeah. So, I mean, it’s your experience day to day as a commando officer operating in Gaza. So give us a feeling for some of the stuff that you’ve written. Give us an idea of how you. Of how you approach this as a diary.
So I would like to start by saying that eight days into the war, not through the war, to the grounded maneuver, I couldn’t communicate with my wife. I could through the classified funding, because she also was part of my unit, but we couldn’t communicate very often. And then one of my friends suggested me to write a letter to my wife. And during that time of me writing a letter, I realized that we are experiencing something that the entire world should understand. And that day on, I start documenting everything by writing a diary. And also documenting with a GoPro that I bought just for that, because it was important for me that people will understand the truth of what that going on.
And let me share one story that I think it’s always. I will always go back to that story because it’s demonstrated better than anything. One of the time we got an intelligence on a school that was full with infrastructure used for terror. But we also knew that that school was full with civilians. So as we always do, we start calling them all out, but no one left the school. We didn’t realize why. So we used the drone in order to scan the area from above, right? And then we saw that there is Hamas guard inside that school that do not let those people, those civilians, to leave the area of the school.
And one of them, a five years old kid, tried to run away, and the Hamas guard shot him in his head and killed him in front of his mom. This is sick. This is very, very sick. You know, people saying that the Hamas using their civilians as a human shield, it’s worse than that. They forcing them to be as human shield. It’s not just they using them as human shield, they putting them, and if they going out, they just kill them. So we realized that time that we have to kill those guards in order to let those civilians to leave the area.
Right. And then one of the Hamas guard went on the rooftop, and he was holding a baby, a palestinian baby, just in front of us. We were 100 meters away, but he knew exactly what we wore. Sure. And he was holding a baby, and behind him was a guy that was holding a camera and waited for us to take that shot. And we didn’t took that shot. Not because we are afraid from that camera guy. If we want, I can tell my snipers, you know, shoot it in the camera and then shoot. But we didn’t took that shot because we have different values.
And unlike those savages, we’re not killing babies and we’re not killing civilians, that they’re not regard to our conflict, but they do. And we didn’t took that shot. And later on, he went on the rooftop again, and he was surrounded by a group of women. One of them bent a little bit. It was enough for our sniper to take that shot and to eliminate that threat. But I’m sharing that because I want the entire world to understand that that time we put our life on the line, I put my life at jeopardy and the life of my friends because we wanted to save that baby.
And then we hear those protests that criticizing us. Well, I know what I did. I know how many times I put myself at risk because I didn’t want to, you know, to take those shots. Right. To harm civilians. Right. Sure. We wanted to make sure that we’re not shooting any civilians, which, by the way, those civilians that we’re talking about, most of them, the majority of them supporting Hamas. Right. Right. I went through their houses. That’s the other part of the story. That doesn’t often get told is that even while you’re trying to save women, children, old people, a lot of them support the savage Hamas terrorists.
So they may not be directly shooting at you, but they end up supporting politically, even logistically, communications wise, they’re supporting the people that are doing these savage attacks. I’ve been at the northern part of Geyser. I can’t talk for the entire Gaza Strip. I can tell you that every house that I’ve been through was full with ammunition, was full with rifle, was full. And you know what? More than that, most of the hand grenade, the hand grenade, and the bomb that they holding was under beds of baby, in baby’s room. You can enter a house and then you can see a lovely sign on a door that says newlywed or a baby.
And then you move the bed or you move the stroller, and then you see the bombs. And let put aside 1 second their hatred against Israel. Let’s say, all right, I want to destroy Israel. Let’s say that I’m with them for 1 second. Why, for God’s sake, you put in bombs and your baby. Yeah. Next to a baby. Yeah, yeah. Your baby, yeah. Your son. Why the hell are you putting ammunition next to kids, you know, you know, care on their life? I don’t know. For me, just sound, they just, they just, you know, they’re supporting death over life.
This is what they educating their kids for. And that’s why it’s so important that you record these experiences that you write down and have published in a book. These firsthand experiences. You saw, you’re dealing with these situations. And an urban combat environment like that has to be hell on earth, right? Because you go doorway to doorway, building to building, and you really don’t know what’s going on. I mean, you have drones, you have scouts, but it’s very dangerous. It’s very high pressure, very high tension. And just as you clear one building, they can set off a car bomb.
You go into the building, they can set off a bomb in the basement and collapse the whole building on you. There’s many, many challenges in this environment. And I mean, I’m talking about my understanding of it. But what were your experiences? Hamas force you to suspicious any civilians, because the way of message that they taking, that they using is to, they basically not fighting with uniforms. They not fight. They are just like regular civilians. They hiding their bombs everywhere or their rpg’s. And then they go in, they climbing into one house in the neighborhood with a plastic bag.
You know, you say all right. This is a civilian, I won’t touch them, I won’t do anything to them. And then suddenly this so called civilian taking an rpg from the house, shoot it at you, right. And then leave the rpg over there and go again as a civilian. And we have to do, and we doing every effort, but people have to understand what are we dealing with. It’s, it’s make no sense to fight like that and we still fighting like that. But then when they protest against us, look, I saw cripples on a wheelchair miracle standing up and then somehow are able to fight against us.
A miracle. Yeah, just like in seconds, you know, 1 second ago you were a cripple, you couldn’t walk, you can see someone holding his wheelchair and then somehow he’s pulling up an AK 47 and start shooting. Right. But this is the people that we’re talking about. These are extremely difficult, very challenging decisions for soldiers. Like I said, going house to house or just moving down a street, it’s extremely dangerous and very difficult. But I believe the israeli defense forces have been very successful that you’ve had, I think great accomplishments being able to secure large areas in Gaza.
What’s left, what is undone? What do you still need to achieve to be able to have some sense of security? First of all, to bring back our hostages. I’m not talking about nothing. First of all, we want our hostages back. This is not too much to request. We have families here that were slaughtered. We have people that were kidnapped while they were dancing, while they were celebrating holiday. First of all, we want to make sure that they’re coming back, hopefully safe, alive. And that’s an open question. That’s a very serious open question. 101 still held but no one really knows how many or if any of the 101 are even still alive.
Well, I don’t know. I hope and hope it’s only what we have here. You know, those brutal terror group, they don’t care about life. They’re using them as cards, nothing else. You know, it’s, it’s like this is what they trying to do. They showed their attention on October 7. They showed their attention every time when they slaughter or executed any hostages. And this is what people should remember. They don’t willing to do any peace treatment, they don’t care about that. They are against the western world and we are just step on the way. And Israel, it’s also important for people to understand that Israel fighting the western world fight.
This is what we’re doing here. Because they shouting death to Israel. As long as they shouting death to America. Yeah. Yeah. That is an often forgotten point as well, is that you’re upholding really the values of western civilization. It’s a cultural, it’s a cultural war. It’s a religious war. It’s a lot more than just a disagreement over land. It is a challenge to democracy, to western civilization, all the things that we sometimes very often take for granted. To your credit, Prime Minister Netanyahu has specifically cited you, congratulated you, and talked about your book and the importance of it.
You’ve got to be very proud of that. Obviously, it’s pretty extraordinary when the prime minister by name points at you and says that your work, your work as a commando officer, but also your work as an author is important and is really a representation of the strength of Israel. Yeah, it’s amazing. I didn’t you like I was on. I’ll tell you a last story. Yeah, I was after me and my wife were, you know, we were deed over that time thing, over 100 days of reserve. Her father told me because he knew that my wife, she’s a Disney fan.
So he told her, look, after you both gonna finish here, I’m gonna take you to Disney. And we went to Orlando. And while me planning on going to the park, one of my friends called me and said, el cana, you have to open right now the tv. And I said, what’s going on? And then he said, pibi Netanyahu is quoting your book. And yeah, it was amazing. And I think it’s helped me to understand that it’s not just my story, that book, it’s our story as a nation. And I heard lots of people found themselves, lots of fighters found themselves inside that book.
And yes, I was honored to hear that Bibi Netanyahu was quoting from my book. And yeah, that’s great. That’s great. Well, listen, as we close out, I want to encourage all of our viewers and listeners to get a copy of this book very appropriately. It’s entitled October 7. And we’ve been joined today by Captain Elkanah Cohenouse, who goes by the nickname of Kuno. And Kuno, we are very pleased and very grateful to you for taking time and sharing with us your firsthand experiences as a commando officer, but also the vision and the hope of Israel as you defend yourselves.
Thank you very much for having me. I want to say thank you to all the people. They are supporting us. It’s mean a lot, and thank you for that. And if someone wants to talk to me, you can talk to me through my instagram. It is Alkana. E l K a n a. Kuno. Kuno. And I would like to answer any question. And, you know, we’re just praying for our hostages to be back and to make sure that nothing like that will ever happen again. So thank you again for having me, and thank you for the support.
That’s great. Thank you again, Kuna. We appreciate you joining us. I’m Chris Farrell on watch.
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