Jun 11, 2026

The Israeli military’s demolition of an entire village in Lebanon is “a Nakba of 2026,” the presence of hunting rifles and a Hezbollah flag is enough to have a Lebanese home designated “terrorist infrastructure,” and Israeli soldiers have operated there and in Gaza out of a “sense of revenge.”

Those are some of the observations of a recently returned Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservist, whose testimony further calls into question continuing U.S. support for Israel’s war efforts in the region and starkly underlines the risks of a proposal currently on track to become law that would yet more deeply fuse the U.S. and Israeli militaries together.

The interview with the ex-soldier was conducted by a Palestinian journalist and by Ariella Steinhorn, the co-founder of a whistleblower advocacy organization, and provided on the condition that the identities of both the IDF reservist and the journalist remain anonymous. The reservist, who has fought in multiple Israeli wars over the past decades, recounted his experience of several deployments in Lebanon since 2023, including Israel’s current invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon, as well as a stint in Gaza after the invasion of Rafah in 2024.