Knowing he would be waving goodbye to his girlfriend, his dog and the couple’s apartment in a fashionable part of Tel Aviv, Sam Sank, from Stanmore in northwest London, had one last thing to complete before heading off to war on October 7.
“It was during Tottenham against Luton,” said Sank, a reservist paratrooper in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), and a Spurs fan. “My mate asked me, ‘Aren’t you going to get a bag ready?’ I said, ‘We just need to wait till the end of the game to see what happens.’ Once the full-time whistle went, we left.”
Sank, 33, is one of many British-Israelis serving on the front lines of a Middle Eastern war that does not involve the country of their birth, a conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 7,000 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis.
Sank, who works in ecommerce and plays in the fourth division of Israeli football, was the only boy in his year at the Jewish Free School, near Harrow, northwest London, to make aliyah, migration to Israel, at the age of 18. “I was considered the crazy one,” he said.
Now he is coming to terms with the battles he has fought with Hamas in Kfar Aza, the kibbutz where infants were killed in one of the worst massacres of the October 7 terrorist attacks.
Advertisement
Sank’s unit killed three Hamas gunmen when they swept the body-strewn area during a 24-hour battle as militants roamed southern Israel days after they used paramotors to fly over and bulldoze their way through the border surrounding the Gaza Strip.
“It was a ghost town. There was no electricity. We went past a car where a family had been killed trying to escape, you could smell the bodies. The crows were circling in the sky the entire time we were there,” he said.
• Israel-Hamas war: follow latest
Sank was still coming to terms with the upending of his life that began with those attacks as he took part in wargaming exercises yesterday in a mock Arab village close to the Syrian border in the Golan Heights, a dusty plateau annexed by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967.
“It was the most harrowing part of these three weeks. I don’t know if I have really processed it yet,” he said.
Advertisement
Israel is preparing for a potential escalation in the conflict that could mean it invading the Gaza Strip to attack Hamas in the south, while simultaneously defending against incursions by the Iran-backed Hezbollah in the north.
The crack of simulated gunfire echoed around the village’s houses, where the flutter of a rag-curtain in an empty window suggested the presence of a watching sniper. The exploded hatch of a tunnel, with iron rebar poking out of blasted concrete, suggested the IDF was well advanced in its preparations for underground warfare.
Based on the number of his friends in the IDF, which includes a Scot in his own small unit, Sank believes there are hundreds, if not thousands, more Britons fighting in Israel.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, the IDF spokesman, grew up on the Clyde and speaks with a thick Glaswegian accent. Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, the former justice minister, addressed peers this week about his greater concerns for the safety of his daughter wearing a Magen David in London than his son fighting with the IDF on the border of Gaza.
“He personally saw the aftermath of Hamas’s atrocities — sights that no 20-year-old, in fact no one, should see. He’s in uniform because if he and his friends were not in uniform, there would not be an Israel,” Wolfson said.
Advertisement
Not far away along the border with Lebanon, Joe, a Chelsea fan, has been camping out with an emergency supply of PG Tips tea since October 7.
The northwest Londoner, 30, who did not want to give his surname because of concerns for his parents and brothers in the UK, made a pact with his best friend from his Jewish school in London to leave England at 18 and join the IDF.
A reservist paratrooper in the Israeli special forces, Joe is a veteran of the 2014 conflict with Hamas in Gaza.
He recalled one occasion during the war when he saw a building booby-trapped with improvised explosive devices blow up while Israeli soldiers were inside. “Our unit was at the very front of the operation,” he said. “I was looking through the window and I saw the whole building blow up. Several people died. A lot of people were injured. We had to go inside and evacuate our team members, give them first aid. It was a pretty horrific experience.”
Joe became a father for the first time a month and a half ago, but when he heard about the Hamas attacks on October 7, the IDF reservist broke Shabbat and drove home immediately to pick up his military gear rather than head to the airport and evacuate his young family to the UK.
Advertisement
“I’ve been in the wild for 20 days now, sleeping on a thin piece of foam, doing my toilet in the bushes,” Joe, a season ticket holder at Stamford Bridge, said.
Married to an American-Israeli, Joe said he felt distanced from the land of his birth when reading coverage in the British media of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which has killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced 1.4 million, according to the UN.
“There’s so many people questioning Israel, questioning our politicians and soldiers, constantly we’re on the back foot trying to justify everything we do. I really think it’s completely morally abhorrent the way people look at it.”
Joe said the pro-Palestinian protests in London and the vandalism of a restaurant in Golders Green, northwest London, has led his Jewish friends to question him about emigrating to Israel. “People are feeling intimidated. They feel like there’s no future for the Jews in the UK and they would be safer here than they are there. Which is a crazy thing to say,” he said.
Like Joe, Sank said he felt conflicted about seeing the reaction to the war in the UK — including the decision by his beloved Tottenham to ban the Israeli flag from the club’s stadium despite its ties to the Jewish community.
Advertisement
“The IDF is the most humane army in the world. No other army warns its enemy it’s going to attack them and tells them where it’s going to attack and tells them to evacuate,” he said.
“The British Army is as guilty of that as any other army in the history of conflict. When we bombed Dresden and Berlin we weren’t telling people to evacuate. There is a clear double standard that is applied to Israel unlike any other country.”
The IDF has been accused by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of war crimes in Gaza, including indiscriminate attacks. The UN has also raised concerns over what it called Israel’s “collective punishment of Gazans”.
Israel has denied all wrongdoing and accused the rights groups and UN of bias. As a public debate rages in the UK over the Hamas attacks on October 7 and Israel’s response to them, on the ground there are Britons fighting with the IDF — and at least 200 Britons trapped on the other side of the wall inside Gaza.
“I really sympathise with the people of Gaza. I think they are being held hostage by Hamas. They are being used as human shields and the aid that is being given to Gaza is being hijacked by Hamas,” Sank said.
Sporting a moustache and a pair of Ray Bans in homage to the macho IDF soldiers of the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Sank said: “I feel patriotic and proud of my British heritage. I’m fifth-generation. All my great-grandparents were born in England or Scotland. My family came over in the late 1800s from Eastern Europe.”
But his plans to move back to the UK with his girlfriend have at least temporarily been thrown into doubt, not only by the war with Gaza, but also by watching clips of anti-Israel demonstrations in the city where he grew up.
“I’m here right now because of my girlfriend in Tel Aviv. But I’m also here right now defending my mum in London,” he said. “The only country in the world where Jewish people can feel safe is under attack.”
