As in all of Israel’s wars, Operation Protective Edge, too, is filled with miracles. I’d like to share some of them with you, miracles that are clearly, absolutely Divine.
Colonel Ofer Winter, commander of the Givati Infantry Brigade, describes an unquestionable miracle that he experienced during this war. He and his soldiers had planned a military action that was to take place before sunrise so that the darkness would conceal them and allow them to proceed undetected. However, the mission was delayed and they had no choice but to continue – even as the sun began to rise, rendering them visible to the enemy. Suddenly, Winter said, a heavy fog came down on them, and concealed them until they completed their mission. He compared it to the Clouds of Glory that protected the People of Israel when they traveled in the desert, and said, “It was really a fulfillment of the verse, ‘For the L-rd, your G-d is the One Who goes with you to give you victory.’” Colonel Winter added that during wartime the soldiers see many miracles.
And when it comes to our enemies, the opposite happens. The following was told by Aharon Samet, the mashgiach of the Badatz Eidah Chareidis who is in charge of the wheat harvesting for shemura matzos. Because they needed wheat for two years because of the upcoming shemitta year, they needed to harvest green wheat. They went throughout Israel looking for suitable wheat but didn’t find any until they reached Kibbutz Sufa near the Gaza border (this is before the war) which, due to unusual circumstances (such as the farmers sowing the wheat in mid January whereas most other fields were sown in November and December), had just what they needed – two thousand acres of green wheat.
Just a day or two after they completed harvesting and transferring all the wheat, 13 terrorists came out of a tunnel from Gaza into the fields of Kibbutz Sufa where they planned to carry out an attack on the kibbutz residents. The terrorists were counting on stealthily making their way from the tunnel to the kibbutz, camouflaged by the wheat fields. But when they emerged from the tunnel, there was no wheat at all and so they were immediately spotted and eliminated by Israel’s soldiers. A massacre was prevented.
Rabbi Chaim Walder, the well known author, told the following story on his weekly radio program during the war, a story which he heard first hand. A religious man, we’ll call him Dovid, went to Gaza to distribute green tzitzis to soldiers going into battle. At the same spot where he was, there was an officer, we’ll call him Tomer, who was extremely anti-religious and started ranting against everything and anything that had to do with Judaism. Dovid asked him some very pointed questions, which challenged the officer’s way of thinking and opened him to listening to what Dovid had to say. Before they parted, Dovid wrote out the six words of Shema Yisrael and gave it to Tomer, telling him to say it twice a day, as well as during any time of danger. Dovid then wrote his own name and phone number on the bottom of the paper, and they parted – Dovid to the home front, and Tomer to the front lines.
About a week or so later, Dovid received a phone call saying that he was wanted urgently in one of the hospitals where wounded soldiers were being treated. He went immediately and was brought to the bedside of Tomer, whose head and chest were heavily bandaged. Tomer told him that after he asked Dovid to be brought to him because he had experienced an outright miracle in the merit of what Dovid had taught him. Tomer had been severely injured in battle, and was lying on the ground, unable to move, when he saw a live grenade rolling towards him and about to explode inches away from his body.