IDF reservist offers harrowing description of "slaughters and massacres" of Israeli civilians
NEW YORK - Israel has called up more than 360,000 reservists to active duty after the Hamas attack.
The response was immediate and overwhelming after war was declared this week.
One of those soldiers who answered the call and is standing by for battle is 30-year-old Rudy Rochman, who graduated from Columbia University. Rochman spoke with CBS New York's Chris Wragge and Mary Calvi from Israel.
"So you have to understand, as reservists, we're no longer in the army. We're just prepared in case there's war. We have to go out of our civilian lives, leave our families, leave our work, leave our jobs, leave everything that we're doing and go back to war. And unfortunately on Saturday we woke up with horrors, what we saw, and eventually they deployed us, and on Saturday, that same day, we went in and started fighting in those same locations," Rochman said.
Rochman said what they found was traumatic.
"We're prepared as soldiers to fight in war, but no one could've been prepared to see the slaughters and massacres that we witnessed in these places. Men, women and children. I mean, it's not a battlefield where soldiers fought soldiers. It's villages. It's communities. It's playgrounds. It's nurseries. They just went in and destroyed everyone," Rochman said. "And I think I need to make it very clear to everyone that this is not a war between Jews and Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims. This is a war between Hamas and human civilians that live in the land of Israel. And their goal is to push a narrative for populations to be polarized. And even though we're in a war now we're going to fight, we're going to win, we need to understand that the human beings on the ground are not the ones at war. It's those that are profiting from this war, which includes Hamas."
Rochman said combat is what he was trained for, but that doesn't make it any easier.
"We know that we're looking at our brothers and our sisters all around us, and some of them are not coming back to their families. So none of us want to go to war. None of us want to lose people, and none of us want to take lives. But unfortunately this is the situation that we're in, and I hope when the smoke settles we learn from this situation and prevent these things from happening," Rochman said.
Watch the full interview in the video above.