Hamas invaded Israel from the south on Oct. 7, and terrorists to the north in Lebanon quickly joined in the jihad against Israel by bombarding any towns within reach of missiles.
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. Over half of his village was destroyed by missiles. Lev shared his own personal story (coming here soon) and the devastating attacks on his village since Oct. 7 in exclusive comments to PJ Media. “[On] the seventh of October we fought literally for our home; all of Israel is our home,” he affirmed.
David, who is 51 years old, was originally in the IDF before later joining a local reserve force. “I was in a special commander unit,” he said, explaining he was an anti-terror instructor. And “in my last few years, I was the second of command in the village of Metula defense brigade.”
Metula, Lev clarified, is the northernmost village of Israel, “located right inside the [border] almost like a Lebanon territory. We are surrounded something … like 270 degrees [by] Lebanon soil. And those territories, Lebanon territories there are something between five to six Shia villages that are completely full of Hezbollah terrorists.” One of these is Al-Khiyam.
Lev described his experience on October 7, 2023: “Early in the morning, as the invasion started in the south, I was in internet connection with my friends in our WhatsApp groups; we have an old friend that served with us in our earlier unit that was in Kibbutz Holit down south [during] the Hamas invasion, and we thought about collecting our arms and going down south to try to help him and save his family.” Holit was one of these communities devastated by the Oct. 7 massacre.
But already, Lev remembered of Oct. 7, he had a “notification that in a matter of minutes, we're going to be [en]listed because the invasion probably will start at the … north too, and no way that I'm leaving the village now, I have lots of family in my village, my mother, my sister, my brother-in-law, and their three kids.” Lev has several children, but his older daughter and son are serving in the IDF, and his son remains in serious danger in the Gaza Strip.
Metula’s defense brigade, Lev told me, “is something between 35 to 40 people. We took all our military equipment and moved on to watch the fences. The village fence is the border fence, actually, like my home is something between some… 300 meters of the Lebanon border. So we literally went out to save our home and try to have some kind of maintenance on the fence before the invasion started; we'll be able to let the people leave the village down south. It took us something between almost 48 hours since the Hamas attack had started that the big military sent the first infantry reserve brigades to Metula, and since then, we joined them in the effort to maintain the village.”
That has been a costly and bloody effort. “From that time until the time that I got wounded, Metula suffered from many, many, many missiles attacks; it’s something between 60 to 70% of Metula buildings were destroyed during that time,” he said of the tragic aftermath. It is horrifying how few people around the world have been focused on the plight of Israeli civilians under constant attack from Hezbollah.
Lev added, “My personal connection to that is that my sister’s home got destroyed by three direct missiles that launched on her place … and her home is — right now is in renovation, because it was completely destroyed.”
And all this time they had to cope with the uncertainty of not knowing whether, as intelligence indicated, they could expect “something between 2000 to 3000 terrorists …that will try to conquer Metula — even after the war started,” Lev said. “Since then, we spent almost every night on the fences and all kinds of military activities around the village and together with the military, and doing what we need to do.”
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He described Metula’s defense brigade as “something that [is a] semi-civilian, semi-military force, as well as we are working with the military and doing military operations, we are trying as much as we can to help the municipality of Metula to handle things that need to be handled in the village.” He gave one example: “If they [terrorists] shot missiles on Metula and fire started because they hit something, the fire department don't want to go up to Metula. So we needed to deal with those fires. It's … us, the defense brigade.”
Of course, Lev wants the war to end if possible. “For Israel, I’m really hoping the war will be ended, all of the hostages will come back home, whoever then is alive comes back home safely and [can] try to rehabilitate his life again as much as he can,” he said.
He added, “I want to see and I want to know my son has left the Gaza Strip, and is already somewhere here in Israel, doing his service much more safely than staying in the Gaza Strip.”
Prayers for Lev and his son and please check back on PJ Media for the harrowing story of Lev’s surviving a missile attack.
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