There is no ceasefire in Lebanon

Last night, my IDF Palmar medical evacuation team were treating and extracting two soldiers from Lebanon. One of them, Captain Maoz Yisrael Recanati, 24 years old, was killed one month before his wedding. The other survived but faces a long road of surgeries ahead. And yet, as I write this, I read that the “ceasefire will be extended for another 45 days”.

Try explaining that to the family and fiancée of Maoz.

There is no ceasefire in Lebanon.

I feel as though I have stepped into an Orwellian novel. President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the mainstream media are all hawking this “ceasefire”. Yet the reality could not be more different. Nineteen-year-old men are fighting and dying in what is a very hot, very real and very unfinished war against the terrorist Hezbollah entity, an organisation hell-bent on completing the slaughter of October 7 and destroying any chance for peace between Lebanon and Israel.

It is not only IDF soldiers being targeted. Israeli civilians who remain in the sparsely inhabited north, where entire cities and kibbutzim stand ghostlike in their stillness, are also in the crosshairs. Whatever our government and the American administration are trying to sell the world, the truth is this: the north of Israel has been left to its own fate for nearly three years. We are in a war of attrition against one of the Iranian regime’s most powerful terror proxies.

When I fought my way back into the IDF in October 2023, despite being well over the age limit, I never imagined I would still be serving more than two and a half years later. And yet here I am, in May 2026.

Decades ago, during my regular service I spent many months in Lebanon, when I served as a Lone Soldier in the Givati Brigade during the years the IDF maintained a security zone in South Lebanon. Our mission statement always ended with the same sentence: “Our mission is to defend the northern communities.” It is shocking and deeply sobering that nothing appears to have changed in over two decades.

Israel is currently fighting three wars simultaneously: against Iran, against Hamas and against Hezbollah. All three are suspended in a state of pseudo-ceasefire, a fiction that costs lives while the world looks away.

It seems Israel is never allowed to win wars, and this has to change. Without conclusive, unconditional victory, we will remain trapped in this grinding cycle of violence, unable to function psychologically, economically or spiritually as a nation.

Three years into this war, entire communities remain displaced, entire industries like the tourism industry, remain paralysed. An entire generation of young Israelis have endured years of war and continue to live with the threat of the return to war at any moment. The country is living in a strange suspension between war and peace, unable to plan their futures with any certainty and wondering when they will be forced back to sitting for hours in bomb shelters as ballistic missiles reign down on them once again.

So why do reservists like me keep returning to fight?

Because we know it is right. Because these are the values we were raised on. Because we consider it an honour to serve our people and our country. Because we understand with absolute clarity that there is an existential threat hanging over our very existence. Because this is yet another war in which we have no choice.

We know it is unfair. We know there are tens of thousands of Ultra-Orthodox draft evaders that are not sharing this burden, leaving our depleted units to shoulder more of the demands of the war. We carry this injustice in our hearts but know that we must keep going. There is no choice. Only the total defeat and removal of the Iranian regime will make the sacrifices we have made worthwhile.

And once this is done, let’s hope we will experience a true “ceasefire”, a ceasefire where parents no longer receive the tragic news Captain Maoz’s loved ones received yesterday.

Captain Maoz Yisrael Recanati, z”l. May his memory be a blessing and may his sacrifice not be in vain.

Dr Tuvia Book is a combat medic, currently in his tenth reserve deployment since October 2023. He has served for hundreds for days in Palmar medical extraction unit.