A year after the Al-Aqsa flood... when female soldiers became a symbol of the failure of the Israeli occupation

The American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, said that female soldiers stationed at the Nahal Oz base had warned the Israeli authorities for months about “suspicious activity” by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), but no one took action.

The newspaper began - in a lengthy report by Anat Peled - on the morning of October 7, when dozens of heavily armed men appeared on the video screen operated by Israeli soldier Maya Desyatnik, who was tasked with monitoring part of the border with Gaza at the Nahal Oz base.

Indeed, the soldier sounded the alarm, “There is a Turkish knight,” using the Israeli military code word for an incursion into Israeli territory, at a time when Palestinian militants were breaching the border in an operation called “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

embodied on screens

That morning, the fears of the observers, which they had repeatedly warned their superiors about for months, became a reality on video screens in the observers’ operations room. They issued urgent warnings to troops in the field, and when more than 150 gunmen overran their base, they frantically called for help. No one came. In the end, about 50 soldiers were killed at the Nahal Oz base, including 15 observers who were shot dead, and seven were captured and taken to Gaza.

Thus, the failure of the Israeli security establishment to heed the warnings of the female observers who served unarmed in Nahal Oz, and its inability to protect them, turned the women into a powerful symbol of the failure of Israeli intelligence and the military on October 7, the author says.

A year later, the October 7 attack is still fresh in Israel, stirring up grief and anger. The war that followed, which killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, continues to drag more of the Middle East into the spiral of violence every day, and dozens of Israelis are still in the hands of militants, according to the American newspaper.

months of warnings

The monitors at Nahal Oz, in the desert 50 miles south of Tel Aviv, are part of a specialized group of women whose job is to monitor Israel's border areas, working in shifts to constantly monitor screens with video streaming from the border 24/7.

Suspicious activity was reported by phone, and Nahal Oz was awash with suspicious activity in the months leading up to October 7, the author says. Former observers say crowds of Palestinians, some armed, regularly showed up at the border fence, setting tires on fire, blocking cameras, and sometimes trying to breach the barrier.

“They pointed to points on the fence where our watchtowers are,” said Roni Lifshitz, 21, who worked as a lookout at Nahal Oz but was at another base on Oct. 7. “I alerted my superiors,” she said, but she doesn’t know what her superiors did next.

She told her mother

In a recording of a phone call a month before Oct. 7, Roni Eshel told her mother that incidents at the fence were increasing and that she would have to spend more weekends at the base. “This is not good,” she said. “We don’t know when we’ll be able to go home.”

In the weeks after October 7, when Eyal Eshel's daughter, Roni, was still classified as missing, her father, frustrated, began his own investigation, speaking to survivors, military officials and anyone he could trace.

It took 34 days for authorities to identify his daughter, Ronnie, at a forensic lab, where anthropologists examined crowns, teeth and what remained of the young women on duty that day. Forensic experts said their bodies had been burned at high temperatures.

The families discovered that the young women did not have fire extinguishers in the operating room, and Eshel and other parents said they could have been saved if rescuers had arrived in time.

Wider failures

Other information that emerged after October 7 points to broader intelligence failures, the author said, explaining that the Israeli military had allocated most of its resources toward the country’s northern border, where Hezbollah was seen as a more serious threat than Hamas, according to an Israeli security official.

Despite the Israeli Attorney General's insistence on forming a government investigation committee, this committee has not yet been formed, because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that investigations should only take place after the end of the war. However, the army is currently conducting its own investigation into what happened in Nahal Oz, to study its performance and draw lessons for the future, and has promised to publish the results publicly.

But the parents want a broader, independent government inquiry to examine the wider failings associated with October 7, with the power to find individuals responsible for the mistakes, and to recommend that such people should not be allowed to continue serving in positions of authority.

Source: Wall Street Journal