‘Every day I realize more how good it is that I’m alive’

Staff Sgt. Aaron Goldenberg, the first soldier severely wounded by a Hezbollah explosive drone in Lebanon and who lost his leg, shows mental resilience and an optimistic outlook during his rehabilitation.

In an interview on “HaOlam HaBoker” from the rehabilitation hospital where he is being treated, he describes a feeling of being reborn. “Every day I realize, first of all, how good it is that I’m alive, and I’m starting to discover myself again for real. It feels like I was born again,” he says.

He demonstrates his willpower through small, everyday victories, such as an intense workout at the gym. “What is my latest victory? I think it was doing a two-hour workout at the gym, something I had never done before the injury.”

Behind this resilience is the memory of the moment he was wounded in Lebanon. Goldenberg says he left his armored tank to physically warn a group of soldiers that had not responded on the radio, and then heard the ominous sound. “We heard a buzzing, I was about to lift my eyes up and... explosion,” he recalls. The realization was immediate and sharp. “I lift my head like this, and I see that my leg is almost severed, and I understand that, okay, I need to put something here to stop the blood because otherwise I’ll die.”

With extraordinary resourcefulness, he applied a tourniquet to himself, an action that saved his life against a threat the force was not prepared for. “We learned about the drone threat as we went along, they did not prepare us,” he emphasizes.

Now, far from the blast site in Lebanon, Aaron Goldenberg’s journey is focused on rehabilitation and gratitude for life itself. He draws strength from the small victories of each day, from steady progress, and from the determination to rebuild his life.