The steady, diesel rumble of a D9 armored bulldozer became a familiar sanctuary for Dayan Avraham Zarbiv, a rabbinical judge from the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court who found himself navigating the treacherous streets of Gaza. Amidst the deafening roar of tracks and collapsing masonry, the boundaries between ancient faith, modern warfare, and extraordinary human spirit blurred into a single narrative of survival and solidarity.
Unexpected Signs in Jabalia
Stepping out of his D9 into a quiet apartment complex in Jabalia one Saturday, Dayan Zarbiv sought out the battalion commander of the Givati Reconnaissance Battalion. As he entered, he froze—a soldier inside was wrapping leather straps around his arm, quietly winding tefillin.
“Wait,” Zarbiv thought, momentary confusion washing over him. “Maybe today isn’t Shabbat? I prayed Mussaf, I made Kiddush…”
He turned to the soldier. “It’s Shabbat!”
The soldier looked up, completely unbothered, unaware of the prohibition against binding tefillin on the Sabbath day. “Up until a month ago, I hadn’t put on tefillin since my Bar Mitzvah,” the young man explained softly. “When the war started, I decided I needed to do it. I searched everywhere until someone gave me a pair, on one condition: that I put them on every single day.”
Later, operating near El Khyam, Zarbiv’s radio crackled: “Dubi Zarbiv, drive to the axis. A young combat engineer is trapped under a collapsed house—go rescue him.”
When Zarbiv arrived and dismounted, the squad recognized him instantly from viral combat clips: “Ah, you’re Rabbi Zarbiv from TikTok!”
Scanning the group, Zarbiv noticed something striking: under every heavy bulletproof vest hung ritual tzitzit fringes. Surprised by what appeared to be a religious unit, he asked the nearest soldier, “Which yeshiva are you from?”
“Which yeshiva?” the soldier laughed. “I went to Makif Bet Ramla—a secular high school. There isn’t a single religious guy in our whole company.”
“Then what are these tzitzit?” Zarbiv asked, gesturing to the fringes.
“What do you mean?” the soldier replied naturally. “It’s war! Even the Druze guys are wearing tzitzit.”
Months later, while sharing these experiences in Yokneam, a couple approached Zarbiv. The husband, wearing a kippah, mentioned that he too had recently begun putting on tefillin.
“Where are you from?” Zarbiv asked.
“Kibbutz Dalia,” the man replied—a stronghold of secular Hashomer Hatzair. “At the start of the war, my wife felt we couldn’t just keep living the same way. She went to the store, bought a hot plate, and we started learning what Shabbat meant from scratch. Then I joined in, started putting on tefillin, and eventually called an organization to donate six pairs of tefillin to other combat soldiers.”
His wife interjected with a smile: “He puts on tefillin, eats strictly kosher, attends a daily Torah class—and he still insists he’s completely non-religious!”
The Genesis of a New Strategy
Questions frequently followed Zarbiv back home. During a radio interview, the host pressed him: “You’re a Dayan—a rabbinical judge handling sacred law. How does a judge become a heavy bulldozer operator?”
For Zarbiv, the answer lay in the brutal reality on the ground. Early in the conflict, a devastating ambush in the Shaboura neighborhood of Rafah claimed the lives of five soldiers when a squad entered a booby-trapped building. The tragedy prompted a fundamental shift in tactics: rather than sending infantry into death traps, heavy machinery would clear paths through hostile structures.
Without traditional military licenses for the machinery, Zarbiv and his comrades built a specialized engineering team within the Givati Reconnaissance Battalion. They transformed raw recruits into skilled operators, developing unprecedented methods to neutralize combat risks.
Where the brigade had previously suffered steady losses every month from enemy ambushes and RPGs, the tactical shift drastically reduced casualties among the infantry, proving that adapting tactics could safeguard lives on the front line.
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| TACTICAL SHIFT IN RAFAH |
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| OLD METHOD: Infantry clearing booby-trapped structures door-to-door. |
| RESULT: High casualty risks from hidden explosive charges and shafts. |
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▼
+————————————————————————-+
| NEW METHOD: Frontline D9 armored bulldozers clearing structures ahead. |
| RESULT: Neutralized ambush risks; significant casualty reduction. |
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As Zarbiv pushed dirt across the Philadelphi Corridor and into the heart of Rafah, the work took an unexpected physical toll and required constant innovation.
“How do you bring down a five-story building with a D9?” others asked.
The answer arrived unexpectedly over Sukkot while Zarbiv was pushing his granddaughter on a playground swing. He realized that demolition required rhythmic timing—hitting the structure precisely at the apex of its sway to multiply force, letting momentum do the heavy work.
Over the radio, his fellow operators joked about the rabbinical judge operating heavy armor, noting that in Hebrew, Dayan (דיין) and D9 (די9) shared the exact same letters.
Near Misses and Miraculous Escapes
Wartime operations brought constant peril. On the eve of Hoshana Rabbah in Jabalia, Zarbiv woke up inside his armor, stepped out to perform the morning rituals, and immediately moved to clear a critical junction.
Within minutes of beginning work, a sudden flash illuminated the cabin—an RPG struck the heavy armored glass directly in front of him.
“Ori, are you okay?” Zarbiv called out through the smoke to his partner.
“Yeah… I think so,” came the shaken reply.
Zarbiv keyed his radio: “Dubi Zarbiv took an RPG hit; Dubi Zarbiv remains operational.”
“Pull back, Zarbiv! There’s another shooter!” the battalion commander warned over the comms.
Reversing into an alley to maneuver, a second RPG struck the vehicle. Despite the shock and the cloud of dust, the heavy armor held. Holding pieces of the shattered projectile later that morning, Zarbiv recorded a brief prayer of gratitude before driving back out to complete the path.
During another operation in Jabalia, Zarbiv worked to collapse a heavily fortified five-story building. As the final support pillars buckled, tons of concrete cascaded directly onto the cab of the D9, burying the vehicle in darkness and tilting it precariously under the debris.
Trapped in total pitch-black isolation—a feeling he described as “the solitude of the grave”—Zarbiv waited out the dust, gripped the joysticks, engaged reverse, and forced the machine through the rubble until the tracks cleared the pile.
Emerging covered in concrete dust, he paused long enough to eat a quick third Sabbath meal—mixing tuna oil and engine grease onto a roll—before returning to clear the remaining objectives.
A Legacy of Survival
Toward the final stages of operations in Beit Hanoun, senior commanders visited the front lines. Meeting Zarbiv beside his machine, military leadership highlighted the immense physical strain and tactical impact of the heavy armor units.
Through relentless operations, the engineering teams altered the landscape of engagement, clearing subterranean networks, eliminating hidden firing posts, and ensuring that infantry units could operate without walking into prepared ambushes.
For Dayan Zarbiv, every structural sweep, every hour spent in the cramped cockpit, and every improvised lesson learned on the battlefield served a singular purpose: bringing every soldier home safely while standing guard over his people.
Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv’s dispute with high-level military leadership and commanders revolves around the strategy used to clear buildings in Gaza and how to minimize IDF casualties.
The dispute centers on the following key points:
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Tactics vs. Higher Command Strategy
- Tactical Approach: Zarbiv advocates for using heavy engineering equipment (D9 armored bulldozers and excavators) to flatten structures from the outside rather than sending infantry inside door-to-door, where terrorists set lethal ambushes and booby traps.
- Higher Command Opposition: Higher-ranking commanders—including the IDF Chief of Staff and the Major General (Commander of the Southern Command)—opposed this widespread destruction.
- The Chief of Staff explicitly argued to stop destroying buildings unless they posed a direct, specific danger, calling the practice superficial and pushing to halt it.
- Major General Finkelman reprimanded Zarbiv directly, telling him to stop saying he was “destroying houses” and to state instead that he was “destroying terror infrastructure.”
- The Chief of Staff even confronted Zarbiv physically (grabbing him by the collar), angrily warning him to stop publicizing the systematic destruction of buildings.
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Disobeying Orders and Operating Without Licenses
- Zarbiv and his comrades established what he calls an informal “militia-like” engineering setup within the Givati Brigade, training soldiers and operating D9 bulldozers without official permits, licenses, or formal military approval for those specific demolition roles.
- Despite repeated warnings and explicit bans from military brass—as well as warnings from the Director General of the Rabbinical Courts that he was risking his position—Zarbiv continued releasing combat videos and giving interviews to promote his demolition-first doctrine.
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Argument Over Soldier Safety and Statistical Proof
- Zarbiv’s Core Argument: Zarbiv argued that traditional tactics were “bleeding us dry.” Sending troops into booby-trapped buildings or allowing armor to navigate narrow streets between standing buildings allowed terrorists to pop out of shafts to attach explosives or fire RPGs, leading to heavy casualties.
- Casualty Comparisons: Zarbiv pointed out the stark difference in casualty rates to justify his approach:
- Prior to this strategy, the Givati Brigade lost an average of 7 combat soldiers per month to enemy fire.
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- Neighboring brigades using standard tactics suffered high losses in short periods (e.g., 20 dead in two weeks, 16 in two months, 14 in two months).
- In contrast, during the 18 months that Zarbiv’s unit employed the systematic D9 clearing strategy, enemy-fire deaths in the Givati Brigade dropped to an average of 0.43 per month
(with only 1 combat death and 3 operational accidents over three months in Jabalia).
Ultimately, Zarbiv’s dispute was driven by his belief that saving soldiers’ lives and achieving victory required overriding standard operational protocol in favor of systematic armor-led clearing.
All this is based on the Hoshana Rabba 5787 Hebrew video talk given by Rabbi Zarbiv