One year after the Oct 7th terrorist attacks, IDF counter-terrorism soldier Nir Maman recounts where he was that day and how he’s processed losing five of his fellow soldiers. Plus, he explains why Israel’s response has been appropriate and why he thinks a two-state solution is not realistic.

Receiving a text message from his daughter telling him to go back to Israel to fight:

“She replied to me, and this is one of the messages that I’ll save for the rest of my life, she said, ‘As much as I never want you to leave home, our people right now need you more than we do, so please go.’ So, (he pauses, choked up) to me that was obviously a huge relief because there was no way I would have been able to be there with a clean head without knowing that my family was behind me.”

Finding out five of his friends, and fellow soldiers, had died:

“My phone was right beside me and a message came in from our unit’s What’s App group. And I remember reading the headline: IDF releases names of soldier’s killed. So, I opened it up, and uh, the … (he pauses, choked up) the guys were listed there. And I couldn’t believe it. I had never actually in my life, in almost 30 years in this line of work, lost any colleagues or any friends of mine in service anywhere. I was in shock.” 

Does he believe there are still hostages who are alive:

“I do believe that there are, yes. I’m not very optimistic about the numbers. But I do believe that there are still, yes. And for the sole reason that for all the terror groups that are involved in this, the hostages are obviously the most important bargaining chips for them and the most important blankets of security for them. And so, it is in their best interest to keep as many of these hostages alive as possible.”

On the suggestion that Israel has gone too far in its military response:

“It’s just mind boggling to me that anybody actually has the audacity to put a label such as ‘disproportionate response by Israel’ or ‘Israel has gone too far.’ We still have dozens of hostages that have not been released. I mean it is mind boggling to me that, at the very least, if that aspect was remedied and they released all the hostages, the nature of this war can take a whole different approach and a whole different protocol.”

The larger problem facing Israel:

“One of the things that bothers me is when I keep on hearing, ‘Israel’s issue is not with the Palestinians, it’s with Hamas.’ The fact of the matter is that Hamas is Palestine. Palestine is Hamas. The fact of the matter is that of the well-over-3,000 terrorists that infiltrated Israel on October 7th, more than two-thirds of them were the so-called ‘innocent Palestinians that don’t belong to the Hamas organization.’ This situation will never come to an end until it is first ideologically resolved. It has nothing to do with land, we know that. Israel has given away over 66,000 square kilometers of land within the last 70 years for peace. It has nothing to do with rights and humanitarian issues. It has nothing to do with any of that. The fact of the matter is that when these Palestinians are left to their own devices, the only thing that they continue to do is that they continue to raise their kids to hate us. They continue to indoctrinate their kids on picking up guns and spilling the blood of Jews.” 

His thoughts on a two-state solution:

“A two-state solution, quite frankly, the Palestinians have already received that. They already received 20 years of ‘Here’s your Gaza. What are you going to make of it? What is your choice?’ And we see what their choice is. Their choice is to spend 20 years and billions of dollars preparing for the Holocaust of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.”