On Independence Day, 2022, two Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the ultra-Orthodox city of Elad near Rosh Ha'ayin and went on a rampage, murdering and injuring passersby with axes and a firearm, and then fled the scene. Elite units were called in to hunt them down – Shin Bet, Egoz, Maglan, the Ghost Unit – but they failed to come up with a lead as to where the terrorists were. There was a concern that they were on their way to commit another massacre.
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The hunt for the terrorists lasted four days. At one point, soldiers from the Mar'ol unit, a unit made up of reservists, that was established in 2014 after the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens, approached the commanders of the operations and suggested that they bring in the Desert Frontier unit, which specializes in tracking.
"They were amazing," says one of the officers who was involved in the operation at the time. "They didn't stop searching for the terrorists for even a moment." While most of the units involved in the search stopped to rest, the Desert Frontier fighters, who are trained to stay in the field for long periods of time, were incessant. "They found cash bills with blood, a zipper, and the remains of a dead pigeon that the terrorists had eaten." After 62 hours, the terrorists were apprehended near where the Desert Frontier team and located these findings, just a kilometer and a half from the site of the attack in Elad.
Work on this article required several months. Not everyone was eager to cooperate. Our approaches to the IDF were refused, and inquiries with sources who are well acquainted with the Desert Frontier soldiers and their commanders were met with raised eyebrows at best, while in other cases they simply turned us down or cut off all contact. The unit, whose name has come up briefly in some of the worst attacks of recent years due to its phenomenal capabilities, made headlines mainly when it got into trouble and "merited" an investigative report on the "Local Call" website, which is identified with the extreme left.
"Tell me about Desert Frontier," I recently asked a senior IDF officer. There was silence on the other side of the line, and then he answered like a good Jew with an evasive question: "What do you know?" Desert Frontier is like a modern Unit 101, [A commando unit founded by Ariel Sharon in the 1950s] with all its merits and disadvantages. That is how the unit was described to us by all the sources interviewed for this article. Desert Frontier is one of the most unique and controversial units in the IDF. It has registered incredible successes, including the apprehension of terrorists, murderers with blood on their hands, but it has also been embroiled in an unusual number of complaints and allegations of problematic conduct, to put it mildly, vis-à-vis Bedouins and Palestinians.
Desert Frontier was established a few years ago, as one of the lessons learned from the 2014 kidnapping and murder of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah. For an entire month, the IDF and police conducted searches for the three, who were abducted in Gush Etzion and buried in the Halhul area. In the end, they were found by members of the Kfar Etzion field school who specialize in tracking. The IDF realized that it had to strengthen its tracking capabilities, and not rely solely on the capabilities of the Bedouin trackers who serve in the brigades. At first, they established Mar'ol, a special unit made up of reservists, which specializes in field work, and later also Desert Fronter – a tiny regular army unit whose sole expertise is camouflage in the field and understanding of the local terrain at levels the army had not reached before.
Staying out for weeks in the field
The idea to establish the unit came from Yuval Gaez, commander of the commando unit Maglan at the time of the abduction of the three youths. Gaez had been promoted to commander of the Binyamin Brigade and with the encouragement of the then head of Central Command Roni Numa, the project was launched with the goal of establishing a unit of young people living on farms and hills in Judea and Samaria, who were familiar with every clod of earth and are able to analyze the ground at the highest level imaginable.
The unit's first cohort consisted of only 12 soldiers, carefully selected by officers well acquainted with the world of the farms of Judea and Samaria. Left-wing organizations claim that these are "the most extreme settles," those the army could not recruit because of criminal cases against them or because of their extremist views. The left views Desert Frontier as a controversial rehabilitation project, but the sources we spoke to while working on this article deny that this is the case. They say that most of those enlisted to the unit would have enlisted anyway and were chosen one by one because of their knowledge of the terrain. "The percentage of hilltop youth in the unit is relatively low, and most of them come from the farms," a source said.
Desert Frontier remains a tight-knit unit, about 50 people in total. All of them are highly professional field personnel; most of them live on farms and are able to stay out in the field for a very long period of time under rough conditions with minimal supplies. Unlike any elite reconnaissance of special forces unit, there are no field tests through which conscripts can join Desert Frontier, and its soldiers are recruited through recommendation, or ask to join after hearing about the unit. "There's no way to test a person's ability in the field in three days – to see whether he can rough it in the field for two and a half weeks with just a sleeping bag, or whether he will whine about it like most soldiers in the army."
One of the first to serve in Desert Frontier was Harel Masoud, who was murdered in a shooting attack at the Eli gas station about a year ago. Residents of Eli, north of Ramallah, describe Masoud as typical of the soldiers who serve in the unit – an idealist who loves the country and wants to do something significant. They say that he prevented quiet attempts by terrorist organizations to smuggle weapons. After completing his service, instead of going on a post-army trip, he became a shepherd.
In his diary, which was published in Israel Hayom after his murder, Masoud wrote about his feelings after ending his army service. "A period of almost three years in the army, a period of disappointments, joy, anger, frustration, a period of ups and downs came to an end. I understood why I was here and where the real war was, what would bring redemption closer and what would not, what would do good for the people of Israel and what would not. I'm sitting in the pasture writing this, and I realize that this is exactly what I dreamed of, to graze the flock, to understand that the battle doesn't always have to be waged with a lot of noise and all sorts of moves and maneuvers. Sometimes it can be waged with simplicity, leisurely, like the flow of the herd and the way it eats."
After conscription, Desert Frontier recruits undergo basic infantry training at the Kfir Brigade base in the Jordan Valley. After that, the soldiers fighters embark on another four months of specialized field training that includes tracker training by top trackers - both from Judea and Samaria and from kibbutzim and moshavim, who are not necessarily from the right-wing side of the political map. Last year, for example, a reservist finished a day training Desert Frontier recruits and then went to a demonstration against the judicial reform on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv.
The field specialists training the unit were very enthusiastic about the concept. These are people who grew up in kibbutzim of yesteryear, each one of them a legend in his own right, and some of them also elite IDF units," says a source who was involved in establishing the unit.
As part of field training, the fighters are trained to conduct sweeps and hunt down terrorists, locate findings in the field, and more. The vast majority of the training takes place in the field, without tents, with the soldiers sleeping out in the rough. "They have a very high level of unique professional skills."
Hunting down terrorists in the Wild West
A member of the unit related how Desert Frontier fighters were asked to come and help one of the elite reconnaissance search for weapons in Hebron, based on intelligence provided by the Shin Bet. Within 20 minutes, the soldiers had located a suspicious finding and asked the reconnaissance unit soldiers to dig a hole in the middle of the garden. Inside a pit that was covered and not visible, they found a concealed weapon.
In November 2022, soldiers from the unit were called in to search for a terrorist who murdered Israelis with two IEDs at the entrance to Jerusalem. The terrorist, a resident of East Jerusalem, planted the IEDs and then hid in a cave near Khan al Ahmar. While fleeing, the scooter he was riding broke down and he left it behind, taking his helmet, weapons, IEDs, and clothes with him and scattering them in the field. The unit identified the unusual pattern and found the terrorist five days after the attack.
The capabilities they demonstrated in these and other events proved that the unit is crucial, but the intensity of their operations is also what has made the unit controversial.
When the unit was established, there was a debate about where to place its personnel. At first, they were under the IDF Border Protection Corps, which stationed it in the Judean Desert, in the area between Highway 1 and the Nahal training base near Arad. The area, where the IDF has almost no presence, is a sort of Wild West, where everyone does almost as they please. It is home to a wide range of criminal activities, from trafficking women to prostitution, drug smuggling, and smuggling weapons and ammunition be it for criminal use or for hostile terrorist activity.
The unit, then completely new, was ripe for the change and for two years conducted intense operations in the area. It made raids and took action mostly to stop weapons smuggling. Its mission was highly successful, but then everything went wrong.
Bedouins in the Judean Desert began to complain about the unit. The Local Call website, a news website identified with the extreme left, published an investigative report claiming that it had dozens of testimonies according to which "soldiers from this unit allegedly attacked and abused Palestinians." Among other things, they claimed that in the years since the unit had been established, "soldiers trod on Palestinians, most of them Bedouin, while they were handcuffed, punched them without any justification, forced detainees to lie in humiliating and painful positions, kicked them, went through private photos on their phones, and stole money, coats, and traditional Bedouin clothing."
Local Call quoted a security source as saying that the unit "consists mainly of hilltop youth … the extreme of the extreme, who otherwise would not have enlisted."
But those close to the unit present a completely different picture. According to them, the Bedouin criminals understood that the only way to get rid of the soldiers, who know how to blend into the terrain and know how to track them down in places where the IDF does not know how to work, is to file complaints – a lot of complaints. The method is one frequently used by Palestinians in the area, who, for example, when there are incidents of friction hurry to file complaints against civilian elements to establish their claim as being right.
Desert Frontier's commander dismissed
If the claims of the unit's soldiers are true, then the hostile action on the part of the criminals has achieved its goal. At around the same time, the head of Central Command, Yehuda Fuchs, took office. He did not see a need for the unit in the area in which it operated and did not see great value in governance in this area. For this reason, and in light of the many complaints, he decided to transfer the unit to the Jordan Valley, where at the time smuggling of weapons from Jordan through the breached border fence to the terrorist organizations in northern Samaria was rampant.
Desert Frontier, which is defined as a brigade-level unit, took the area as a project and began mapping it. The unit's operatives went into the field and began to carry out ambushes inside Israel in order to catch the smugglers. Hundreds of weapons were seized by the fighters during this period, an impressive achievement by all accounts. But now there was another problem: there was already a special Border Police unit, Matilan, with a very similar purpose, and as a result, the IDF was left wondering what to do with Desert Frontier.
At the same time, left-wing activists and Palestinians in the Jordan Valley filed complaints about the unit. The unit's soldiers say these are baseless claims and because they know that they are being "looked for" they operate in a very calculated manner. On the other hand, it's hard not to see a pattern that is being repeated. The fact that many of the soldiers come from farms in Judea and Samaria, which often take a very aggressive approach towards the Palestinians, based on the perception that they understand only force, raises the question of whether they have imported this approach into the unit.
We should note here that in recent years the Jordan Valley has become an arena of conflict between left-wing organizations and the settlers. Footage released last July by the far-left organization Looking the Occupation in the Eye from July last year clearly shows the left's contempt for the Desert Frontier unit. The footage shows masked soldiers speaking to Palestinians; the organization added a particularly malicious caption: "Muarrajat, Southern Jordan Valley, Desert Frontier unit, composed primarily of settler-terrorists from the hills of the West Bank. Led by a settler-terrorist from a nearby illegal outpost, they enter and trespass together, threaten to make arrests, confiscate a tractor, and then end the operations together with a coffee at the outpost. There is no humanity or legality in the brutal behavior of the forces of crime and evil," read a post on the organization's Twitter account.
The event that almost broke the camel's back occurred at the beginning of the war. In the first week of the war, three terrorists armed with a knife and an axe infiltrated the area of the Meko Farm in Binyamin, in the area of Wadi Siq village. The terrorists were apprehended by regional defense soldiers who were present at the farm and Desert Frontier fighters who were dispatched to the area. The soldiers found weapons and a walkie-talkie on the suspects. During their interrogation, the terrorists claimed that they had been beaten during the incident. According to them, the soldiers stripped them, beat them, and put out cigarettes on them. A photo was circulated online of the of the three naked.
Following the incident, the military police launched an investigation. A few days later, the army, in an unusual step, decided to remove the Desert Frontier commander who was there at the time of the incident, as well as five other soldiers. This caused consternation within the unit that was reflected in statements made by the parents of soldiers in the unit following the dismissal of the commander: "What happened here is a knife in the back of our children. Since the start of the war, we have hardly seen them. Day and night they are busy with defensive and offensive operations, but as far as the IDF command is concerned, a complaint by despicable terrorists just after the Simchat Torah massacre is worth more than fighters who risk their lives every day."
The incident raised many questions. First, how is it that soldiers were dismissed on the basis of claims by armed terrorists who entered an Israeli farm a few days after the October 7 massacre? Second, was it indeed the Desert Frontier soldiers who carried out the alleged acts? Sources connected to the unit say other people at the scene placed the blame on the soldiers, calculating that a military force would not be taken to account. Either way, the damage to the unit, whose name had already been tarnished, was enormous.
In December, various media outlets reported that the Desert Frontier unit would be closed. I spoke with an officer from Central Command who said that the debate over closing the unit was not down to any specific incident, however serious, but to a backlog of events, including disciplinary ones. It should be noted that alongside the incident in the Jordan Valley, it also turned out that Aviad Frija, a reservist, who mistakenly identified and shot dead Yuval Castleman, an armed civilian during a terrorist attack at the entrance to Jerusalem, had previously served as a soldier in Desert Frontier.
"The main problem was disciplinary. There were quite a few abnormal incidents in the unit, including poor values and an absence of norms. Something there wasn't working. There was no military routine; there were lots of drugs and alcohol. There was also a serious car accident that involved the unit," says a source at Central Command. "The dismissal of the soldiers was not just because of the incident on the farm – there was a need for change."
Israel Hayom has learned that the threat to close the unit has been lifted. Among other things, a new commander has been appointed to lead the unit which has been moved out of Judea and Samaria.
Expanding the ranks
In any event, Central Command understands that Desert Frontier is a unique unit. "If it becomes organized, the unit may be able to grow. It must be noted that Desert Frontier has had many successes. They seized terrorists and weapons; they have skills that cannot be taken from them. The goal for us is first of all to enable these guys to enlist and also to take advantage of their abilities – of course, as long as they meet the norms, the army's minimum standards."
But its highly unusual character, not seen in standard IDF units, may well be what distinguishes Desert Frontier from the rest. This is also perhaps why quite a few sources compare it to the mythological Unit 101 – a special reconnaissance and tracker unit, that carried out unusual operations and whose soldiers had an intimate knowledge of the terrain they operated on. The rogue nature of the 101, established by Ariel Sharon in the 1950s, attracted people who did not conform, the type of people who pulled in directions the IDF cannot afford to take – a unit of outsiders, who brought something unique to make the IDF a stronger and better army.
People from Judea and Samaria who are familiar with the unit and its soldiers are convinced that it is a critically important unit and that its advantages far outweigh its disadvantages. "It's true that there is not much discipline, but these are the best people. These are top fighters, who know the terrain like the back of their hand. Look at what they have achieved in the short time they have been around – they have seized terrorists with blood on their hands and a quantity of weapons that could have been used to murder many more Israelis. The unit needs to be given responsibility and allowed to work. Its potential is insane."
In the meantime, the Desert Frontier Unit is trying to draw conclusions so it can move forward and is convinced that the unit can emerge from its difficulties and escape closure. First and foremost, the unit wants to bring in recruits from additional sectors, people who are not religious, from the agricultural world, and agricultural high schools in order to strengthen its capabilities even more and create a consensus within which the unique unit will continue to exist. "The unit needs to maintain its uniqueness and we need to see how it can become even more influential," concludes a source close to the unit.
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