Israeli search and rescue commander compares Surfside experience to responding to terror attack

It’s been more than two years since tragedy struck Surfside.

The Champlain Towers collapse killed 98 people. An army of search and rescue professionals scoured the wreckage, hoping to find survivors, but quickly realized they were on a recovery mission. A team from Israel, led by Israel Defense Force Colonel Golan Vach, spent two weeks working on the rubble pile.

“Horrible incidents like Surfside add something to our resilience, and it allows us, it gives us the strength to face similar incidents like these,” Vach said from Israel in a Zoom interview.

Vach’s team is now in charge of recovering and identifying victims of the barbaric Hamas terror attacks. As one of the first on the scene, he saw the atrocities firsthand.

“You saw the pictures, you saw the videos, I personally was the one that was in charge of dealing with this situation,” Vach said, speaking about arriving at one of the kibbutzim which had been overrun by heavily armed gunmen.

Vach said even though they use the same tools and the same techniques, there’s a world of difference between working at the scene of an accident like Surfside, compared to the scene of an intentional slaughter of civilians. 

“To see what a man can do, it affects you, as a first responder,” Vach said.

I asked how he and his team deal with what they see.

“You’re just, disconnect, and the amount of casualties and the various kinds of death, of massacre, you just disconnect, you pull out all your sensors, you work like a machine,” Vach said.

Vach said words can’t describe the depths of brutality he witnessed, and says those who minimize the Hamas attacks are blinded by preconceived narratives.

“The truth does not matter, so I feel pity for the people who are trying to justify the horrors,” Vach said. “You cannot convince them.”

There’s no doubt the Hamas surprise attack left Israel in a deep state of trauma. Vach points out that many of those murdered in the towns near the Gaza Strip were peace activists. Those who survived lost loved ones, their homes, and their belief in coexistence. The toughest part of Vach’s job now might be talking to them.

“We say that the dead does not scream at night, the live do,” said the veteran IDF colonel. “The IDF failed, to talk to civilians nowadays, it’s not an easy thing, they ask us, why did it take you so much time to get to our houses, to save us, and we don’t have very good answers.”

There will be time for Israel to investigate the military and intelligence failures of Oct. 7. Right now, Vach’s team is in Gaza supporting IDF combat units. The first priority, he says, is bringing the hostages home and defeating Hamas once and for all.