FIDF LIVE BRIEFING: Brig. Gen. Elad Edri, Chief of Staff, Homefront Command - July 12, 2026

Jennifer Scher opens this IDF Live briefing by introducing Brigadier General Elad Edri, Chief of Staff for the Homefront Command, who joins from Venezuela after two major earthquakes caused historic damage and prompted a rare request for Israeli assistance despite the absence of diplomatic relations since 2009. Edri explains that, unlike past Israeli disaster missions focused on search-and-rescue, this delegation was asked to provide recovery expertise, so Israel sent a 30-person team centered on engineers trained to inspect damaged buildings and classify them as safe, repairable, or unusable. He describes the mission as both technically complex and emotionally significant: the team needed nearly four days to reach Venezuela, was warmly received by the local Jewish community, and later presented a national recovery framework to senior Venezuelan officials and the president. Edri says the delegation quickly expanded from inspecting individual buildings to helping draft a broader one-to-two-year national recovery plan for hundreds of damaged structures, drawing on lessons from Surfside, Turkey, and Israel’s own wartime home-front experience. He shares moving moments of civilians crying with relief when told their homes were safe, and says the mission has become about more than rebuilding buildings—echoing Prime Minister Netanyahu’s line that Israel came to “recover buildings” but is also helping “recover relationships between countries.” The briefing closes with gratitude for the Homefront Command team, a prayer for their safety, and a reminder that FIDF supports Israel’s soldiers wherever they are serving, whether on the front lines of war or in humanitarian missions abroad.