Hi,
It is the first time we met a bobby trap, and a very cruel one, it was an explosive Teddy bear lying between the ruins of a building we pass through.
The first thought that came into my mind was the teddy bear I have found in the ruins of the houses of the settlement of Netzarim about 20 years ago. The settlement used to stand pretty much on the same area we are now standing on. Those houses the Engineering corps explode, were built on top of the houses we demolished on the Israeli disengagement from Gaza on 2005.
The teddy bear I picked up from the ruins of the settlement was belong to a child that believed he will live there for the rest of his life and will not be evacuated. This teddy bear might have belong to a child that probably thought the same, and later used by Hamas terrorists to try and hit IDF soldiers.
If you think How come they decided to use a teddy bear puppet as an explosive, you should go back and look on what happened on the Black Sabbath of October 7th to understand how cruel Hamas terrorists are. Using a small child puppet as a explosion device to hurt others fits the way they think and work.
The way to deal with such a trap is first to fire it with a heavy gun (such as a Barrett M82) and hopefully to ignite it. When it does not work (as happened to us) you take a step forward and remove the trap. The guy did it using a very small amount of explosives only to break it and remove it from the site, so we can keep going forward.
Take Care
Gad
A soldier near the explosive teddy bear we met (the bear marked in a red arrow)
The explosive teddy bear in a close up