The IDF has committed $6.2 million toward training and infrastructure, while the Eshkol Regional Council has allocated land for a dedicated training facility to make this a long-term reality.
By Steve Linde, JNS
Australian immigrant Ari Briggs has partnered with Israeli counter-terrorism warfare expert Ehud Dribben and the Israel Defense Forces to train communities in southern Israel—and elsewhere—to make sure that nothing like the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre happens again, JNS has learned.
Since its inception in December 2024, the program—called Magen48 and founded by the Magen Yehuda NGO—has been on a mission to enhance the security and preparedness of border communities.
“Magen48 stands as Israel’s first civilian-led initiative dedicated to systematically training first-response teams across an entire region,” Briggs told JNS.
“Our collaboration with the IDF ensures that communities are equipped with the skills and confidence to protect themselves, thereby reshaping the security dynamics of the southern border.”
“What we’re doing now with Magen48 is scaling and formalizing that life-saving training—not just for a handful of lucky communities, but for every community on the frontline,” he added. “The goal is to ensure no community ever faces another Oct. 7 unprepared.”
Ari Briggs, the co-founder of Magen48, made aliyah from Australia. Photo courtesy of Ari Briggs
Briggs, 55, a management consultant who immigrated to Israel from Sydney in 1993 and now lives in Ra’anana with his wife and five sons, is a former director of the legal advocacy organization Regavim.
He is also the founder of One People, a group he started when he discovered that his son, an IDF reservist, and his friends lacked ceramic vests and other protective equipment at the beginning of the war against Hamas.
He noted that the IDF’s recently published investigation into the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks identified the lack of standardized training and equipment for first responder teams in Gaza Envelope communities as a critical failure.
“Magen48 is the first and only project actively implementing the corrective action the IDF itself called for,” he said.
“This is the first time the IDF is formally partnering with a civilian NGO to build a professional, ongoing training system for civilian first responders, turning what was previously a patchwork of uncoordinated local teams into a national model for professionalized civil defense.”
Magen48 works together with the IDF Southern Command’s Gaza Division, the security chiefs of the Gaza Envelope’s four regional councils and frontline teams in all 66 of the region’s communities, including the city of Sderot.
The IDF has committed $6.2 million toward training and infrastructure, while the Eshkol Regional Council has allocated land for a dedicated training facility to make this a long-term reality. “The partnership with the IDF elevates the program’s credibility, professionalism and impact,” said Briggs.
The 12-month training program includes:
• Tactical skills: Weapons training, close-quarters battle (CQB) and perimeter protection.
• Coordination: Seamless communication strategies between community teams, regional security officers and military units.
• Advanced capabilities: Long-range target training, drone reconnaissance and secure entry/exit management.
• Medical training: Emergency medical response and evacuation protocols.
• Command and control: Team leadership development and real-time scenario-based decision-making.
IDF security forces training in the south with Magen48 to ensure that a massacre like Oct. 7 never happens again. Photo courtesy of Magen48.
The proof: What saved Erez and Magen on Oct. 7?
“This program isn’t theoretical,” said Briggs. “The entire concept was inspired by the success of two communities—Erez and Magen—that managed to […] fight off the Oct. 7 terrorist onslaught, saving countless lives. The only reason they succeeded where others tragically failed is because their teams were trained in advance by my partner, Ehud Dribben—a counterterrorism expert and former Ministry of Defense chief instructor.”
Magen48 co-founder Ehud Dribben is a counter-terror warfare expert. Photo courtesy of Magen48.
Dribben has decades of operational and instructional experience, specializing in combat training and community security after serving in Israel’s elite military units, where he honed his skills in counter-terror operations.
“We call the program in Hebrew the passage from ‘from amateurism to professionalism’ because until now, no one took the training of communities seriously,” he told JNS in an interview.
“This is part of the reason it didn’t work. There was no effective line of defense, and we realized we had to do something about that, and we’ve got to take it seriously in a professional manner in a long-term strategic project and training program.”
He said that the most notable exception prior to Oct. 7 was an intensive annual training program he had conducted at Kibbutz Erez.”We saw when the first response team knew how to work together, they managed to create a fighting force to save their community, and this is what we’re looking for,” he said.
Essentially, Dribben said, the aim of Magen48 is “to take the entire Gaza Envelope community and to rebuild their confidence in themselves and the IDF, and in their response if, God forbid, something happens again. People will come back only if they feel safe.”
Most importantly, he stressed, is the collaboration between communities and the IDF, with joint training drills every six months.
“The army can give so much when it comes to the basic training of soldiers, but we want much more, on a tactical level—training and technology, organization and equipment, facilities and simulation,” Dribben added. “There is a lot of stuff that the army can give, and we give extra. That connection, that collaboration between the army and us, is great.”
The second part of the project, he said, is designing a security program for each community. “We analyze the threat and we figure out the response on the community level, with what we have,” he said. “In every situation, we need to know who’s doing what, where and when and with whom.”
In the yearly training program, Magen48 offers four to six sessions on the new security plan within the community itself, “and this is how we connect all the dots,” said Dribben.
Between the start of training in December 2024 and the end of February, said Dribben, 30 communities completed the first phase of the program, which includes comprehensive weapon and safety training.
By the end of April, Briggs said, all 66 communities should have completed the first phase. “This is not a one-time exercise,” he stressed. “It’s a permanent, year-round training cycle, ensuring these teams stay at a high operational standard.”
Danny Epstein is a member of Kibbutz Erez’s kitat konenut (rapid response team), trained by Ehud Dribben. He was shot in the throat on Oct. 7 as he heroically fought off Gazan terrorists who invaded Israel, and attributes his survival to the training he had received.
Asked about Magen48, Epstein told JNS, “I think it’s an excellent model for kitot konenut. The training was serious and professional and followed a structured program, and we could see the team’s improvement. As I told Ehud [Dribben] afterward, the training we did was decisively important for us on that terrible Shabbat, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
Ilan Isaacson, the security chief of the Eshkol Regional Council, who immigrated to Israel from South Africa in 1975 with his family and moved to Moshav Sde Nitzan, told JNS that Magen48 was a unique initiative.
“First of all, after Oct. 7, it’s not that we don’t rely on the army; we rely on the army 100 percent. But after what we’ve been through, especially here in the Gaza Envelope, where we had a massacre, we also have to take things into our own hands. We are very grateful that the army is also involved in the project, but there’s also a civilian side, to upgrade the first-response teams, give them capabilities that the army is not going to give them, but we also want to make sure that it’s in our hands.”
Asked if he thought Magen48 was a model that could be replicated elsewhere, Isaacson said: “Absolutely. I’m sure that afterward they can take it to the northern border and all the borders, including Judea and Samaria. It’s not something only for the Gaza Envelope, but the war started here, and at the moment we don’t see it ending at all.
“It was important to start here, because all our first-response teams were more or less destroyed. A lot of my mates were killed—over 40—and we have to rebuild everything from scratch. To rebuild something, it can’t be the same as it was before; it must be much better. So you have to give people confidence that it will be better, that the training is more serious, and adapted to every area differently. Every place has its own challenges. It’s a good model but it has to be flexible.”
As Israel resumed its strikes against Hamas on March 18, he added: “I think we have to know that Hamas is not going anywhere, that we’ll be fighting all our lives, and that we have to influence what is happening in our area, taking things into our own hands, and rather than blaming everyone, take responsibility and give the people living here the security that is needed. And Magen48 is the basis of this.”
Restoring safety and confidence
Magen48 is seeking funding for community sponsorships, operational support and the construction of a National Training Facility to ensure long-term success, said Briggs.
“Our mission focuses on enhancing security to create conditions for communities to flourish, encouraging residents to return, rebuild
and contribute to a thriving local economy,” he said.
The model is now being considered for expansion to Israel’s northern border to face the Hezbollah threat and to Judea and Samaria to counter the threat of Palestinian terrorist organizations, he added.
“This is about the future of Israeli civilian defense, born directly from the trauma of Oct. 7, and it connects directly to the global Jewish community, many of whom are now sponsoring specific communities’ training through our Twinning Program—building new bonds between Diaspora communities and the frontline communities of the Otef Aza [Gaza Envelope],” said Briggs.
Among the communities in the Twinning Program are Woodsburgh Minyan, Woodmere with Kibbutz Sa’ad, Young Israel, Lawrence Cedarhurst with Kibbutz Be’eri and Adat Yeshurun, La Jolla, with Shlomit and Avshalom.
The Center for the Protection of the Jewish People
“Oct. 7 proved that civilian communities cannot rely solely on military intervention for protection,” Briggs said. “The military cannot be everywhere at once, and communities must be equipped to defend themselves.”
For this reason, he said, Magen 48 has decided to build what has been called “The Center for the Protection of the Jewish People,” a global hub for professional civilian defense training based in Israel.
“This center will serve as a place where Israel’s frontline first responders, and Jewish communities worldwide can learn from the lessons of Oct. 7 and prepare for the threats of the future,” he said.
“It will provide standardized, high-level training to ensure that every defender—whether in the Negev, the Galilee, or a Jewish community in
Europe or North America—has the skills and confidence to protect their people.”
The center aims to bridge the gap between past failures and future security, ensuring that the sacrifices of Oct. 7 were not in vain. “It will stand as a beacon of Jewish resilience—a declaration that never again will Jewish communities face annihilation without the means to fight back,” said Briggs.
“The creation of the Center for the Protection of the Jewish People is not just a response to Oct. 7—it is a commitment to the future. It is a promise that Jews will never again be left unprepared in the face of those who seek to destroy us.”
This center, he concluded, will stand as a permanent declaration: “Wherever Jews are threatened, we will be ready. We will stand guard. We will defend our people. Together.”
