From New York to the front lines in Gaza: An American IDF veteran tries to tell Israel’s story

In the raucous U.S. debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sam Fried offers a rare on-the-ground assessment — from the very front lines of the brutal fight in Gaza.

The New York native, who had already volunteered to serve a two-year hitch with the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper that ended in 2022, recalls that he was visiting friends in the city when Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023 rampage into southern Israel that killed more than 1,200 people — mostly civilians — while taking hundreds of others hostage.

The attack coincided with the Jewish religious festival Simchat Torah, which marks the conclusion of the annual cycle of public Torah readings.

Mr. Fried, an observant Orthodox Jew, spent the previous evening visiting several synagogues to commemorate the holiday and didn’t get to sleep until about 3 a.m. He was roused a few hours later by someone telling him that Israel was at war, something the IDF veteran admits had had trouble comprehending.

“I’m thinking, Israel’s not actually at ‘war.’ It’s maybe a couple of hundred rockets or something. Who knows?” Mr. Fried said in an interview with The Washington Times.

Because of the religious holiday, Mr. Fried didn’t have access to his cell phone and couldn’t confirm whether the story was true or not. His rabbi permitted him to break the sabbath restrictions and check because it was an emergency. He discovered 15 missed calls from soldiers in his old unit and hundreds of text messages from their group chat.

Mr. Fried had served at an outpost near the Gaza Strip during his 2020-2022 hitch in the IDF. His post was among the locations overrun by Hamas fighters during their assault across the border. The attack exposed the vulnerabilities of Israel’s border security system, long thought to be one of the most advanced in the world.

“Some of our friends had unfortunately been killed and some of our friends – we didn’t know if they were hostages or missing,” Mr. Fried said.

He also learned that Hamas militants abducted the girlfriend of one of his teammates from the Supernova music festival, where more than 360 civilians were killed and hundreds of others were wounded.

Although he was now making a good living in the financial industry in New York, Mr. Fried said there was no doubt he would return to his old paratrooper unit. Following an admittedly difficult discussion with his family, within days Mr. Fried was on a flight back to Israel.

“My grandfather fought in World War II and I said it was imperative that I would do something bigger than myself. I always felt that if I was born in the time of the Maccabees, I would be a Maccabee,” he said, referring to the Jewish fighters who battled Greek occupiers in ancient Israel.

Fighting for Israel

About 3,500 Jewish soldiers from abroad have served in the Israeli Defense Forces at any given time over the past 20 years. Of that number, about 1,200 come from the United States, according to a March 2022 study in the journal Sociological Forum.

After a few weeks of refresher training and capturing terror suspects operating in the West Bank, Mr. Fried’s unit pushed into the Gaza Strip as part of the IDF’s mission to cripple Hamas’ ability to launch future attacks from the Palestinian enclave. He feels strongly Israel has been wrongly portrayed as the aggressor in the brutal 10-month war that ensued.

“Because of what [Hamas] did, they knew we had no choice but to retaliate. We had no choice but to utterly and completely destroy them,” he said.

The Palestinian civilians had already evacuated the area when his unit moved into central Gaza. Their job was to methodically search and clear any location where Hamas fighters or their weapons caches could be located.

Mr. Fried and his fellow paratroopers regularly battled Hamas fighters on the ground even after the target areas had been pounded by IDF artillery and air attacks. Sometimes they battled snipers at long distances, while other times the fight was nearly hand-to-hand.

“We found weapons everywhere we went [and] we found tunnels everywhere we went. Hamas has no distinctions between civilians and combatants,” Mr. Fried said. “They were happy to fight from a schoolroom or a child’s bedroom.”

It was widely known that Hamas militants had constructed tunnels beneath the densely populated Gaza Strip, but the scale of the network now criss-crossing the enclave was shocking to IDF troops. It gave the terrorists the ability to launch attacks against Israeli soldiers from multiple locations, at times almost with impunity.

“They would shoot a couple of [rocket-propelled grenades] and then some sniper fire. Then they could essentially disappear,” Mr. Fried said. “Then, two hours later they could reappear with another RPG and shoot another couple of rounds.”

The ground operations inside Gaza were laborious and exacting. Every room was checked and every hole was probed to ensure it couldn’t pose a threat to the IDF personnel.

“You end up finding tunnels and you end up finding terrorists and ammunition,” he said. “I’m proud to say that my team did some good work over there.”

The battle back home

Mr. Fried, who spent about two months fighting in Gaza, said he has no ill will toward the Palestinian people living there. Hamas will not hesitate to sacrifice any number of Palestinian civilians if it will advance their ambition to destroy Israel, he said.

“It’s unbelievable. Israel is pegged as the enemy and the aggressor here yet we are defending ourselves,” Mr. Fried said. “There are 120 hostages in Gaza as we speak. If Hamas wanted to end this war, all they would have to do is release the hostages and disarm. It’s that simple.”

Mr. Fried hung up his IDF uniform after returning home to the U.S. but says he is now engaged in another kind of war — this time against what he said is a torrent of misinformation and hostility over Israel’s actions in Gaza. The immense sympathy toward Israel after Oct. 7 has in many cases turned into violent anti-Semitic attacks against Jewish Americans, he said, as the number of Palestinian civilian casualties has mounted.

After returning to his job in finance, Mr. Fried visited the anti-Israel protest sites at college campuses in New York in an effort to start some kind of dialogue with the other side. But he said the demonstrators had no interest in what he had to say, preferring to hurl curses and threaten his life.

Activists wouldn’t talk to him at one college campus because he was wearing a yarmulka, the skullcap traditionally worn by Jewish men. He has been physically assaulted and at times required a police escort to escape possible injury.

In June, he was invited to address a pro-Israel group in Idaho about his experiences as an American IDF veteran who had served in Gaza. But anti-Israel activists plastered his photograph throughout Boise, saying he wasn’t welcome in the community. Militants later came to his hotel and did an estimated $10,000 worth of damage to the building, but luckily he wasn’t there.

“How do you expect us to have peace if the other side does not accept our right to exist?” Mr. Fried said. “The Holocaust didn’t begin suddenly with gas chambers. It started with vilifying Jews.”