Advocacy Highlights - August 2024

This article, from Hadassah Magazine, affected me deeply. The whole course of “October 7th” might have been different if the warnings of these young female soldiers were heeded. - Helene

The Tragic Fate of Israel’s Female Observer Soldiers by Maayan Hoffman

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Roni Eshel loved food. During weekends, her parents would visit her at the Nahal Oz base close to the border with Gaza, where she served as a field observer, or tatzpitanit, in the Israel Defense Forces. For the year and four months that she was stationed there, they would bring pasta, salad and meat dishes and sit together in the beautiful, flower-filled park between the base and Kibbutz Nahal Oz, eating and laughing.

That park is now overgrown, and the smell of fresh flowers has faded. Plastic shopping bags are tangled in the thorny brush. And Roni is dead.

On October 7, beginning at 6:23 in the morning, hundreds of Hamas terrorists stormed Roni’s base, murdering around 60 soldiers, including 15 unarmed female field observers, members of IDF Unit 414—the majority of whom burned to death while hiding in their command center. Seven observers were kidnapped; the IDF later rescued one, Ori Megidish, and the body of another, Noa Marciano, who was killed in captivity. Hamas is still holding hostage the other five. Only four female observers escaped the carnage.
The buildings on the base are scarred with bullet holes. Most of the surveillance cameras are destroyed. And every thing in the command center, the operations hub where the observers spent most of their working hours monitoring Israel’s border with Gaza, is blackened or melted—from the computers to the walls.

More than eight months after the attack, the smell of fire still lingers inside the building, evoking the tragedy that be fell the young women who died there. As Roni’s father, Eyal Eshel, walked through the command center on a recent visit, his footsteps echoed amid the charred remains. He travels to the base every month or so from the family home in Tzur Yitzhak, a small village north of Tel Aviv.
He, like many in the country, is still searching for answers: Why were these soldiers, stationed less than a mile from the Gaza border, without defensive weapons? Why were they instructed to remain in their safe rooms and command centers while no efforts were made to rescue them?

And, perhaps most critically, why were these women’s repeated warnings about a potential Hamas infiltration ignored? Could the October 7 tragedy and ensuing war have been averted if their warnings had been heeded?

“No one listened to them. No one took care of them,” Eshel said. “These were nobody’s soldiers.”

In May, the families of the female observers who remain in captivity—Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniela Gilboa and Naama Levy—released a video captured on Hamas body cameras of their loved ones being abducted on October 7, once again drawing public attention to the story of the observers at Nahal Oz. The video shows the women bloodied and being tormented, with one terrorist specifically referring to those they were abducting as “female war prisoners.”

“No one has the privilege of ignoring this video, of seeing the humiliation the girls experienced every single moment,” said Ariev’s sister, Sasha Ariev.

The families said they released the video to put pressure on the government to return to negotiations and close a deal for the hostages. The next day, the government announced that negotiations had resumed.

“The story of the brave observers is, on one leg, the story of the failure” of Israel on October 7, said retired IDF Gen eral Noam Tibon. Their story, he said, needs to be uncovered “to honor their memory and to learn…what we need to fix in the IDF and the State of Israel.”

Along all of Israel’s borders, dedicated command centers like the one at the Nahal Oz base operate around the clock, as IDF observers diligently monitor the safety of their sectors. These soldiers and officers, who are overwhelmingly women, are acutely aware that the security of their region can hinge on their immediate decisions.

“We have four shifts,” former tatzpitanit Roni Lifschitz explained. “Four hours on, four hours off. You have to know an area by heart. It’s about four to five kilometers [two and a half to three miles] at a time. You need to watch for any suspicious activity. It’s a challenging task, not physically but mentally.”

Lifschitz, who completed her army service in December and is now taking some time off, was a soldier at the Nahal Oz base. On October 7, she was in the middle of a training at a base in Jerusalem. The job of an observer, she explained, can be arduous. They must not take their eyes off the screen that monitors the border while operating a computer keypad with one hand and potentially using the other to use a radio device to talk to superiors or conduct other tasks.

There are a handful of observer bases along the perimeter of the country. In the South, the main bases with observer soldiers are currently in Re’im, Kisufim and Zikim; there are no longer any observers in Nahal Oz, although a small group of combat and other soldiers are operating there.

Many observers graduate high school with outstanding academic records. They excel in their military training and are carefully selected to serve on the border. However, despite the significance of their role and being considered members of the IDF Combat Intelligence Corps tasked with reconnaissance and gathering information close to enemy lines, the position is classified as junior-ranking. These female soldiers, trained in firearms usage, are unarmed.

In the past, a handful of observers committed suicide, and after that it was decided that they should not bear weapons. They are stationed at bases with armed combat soldiers. The observers at Nahal Oz, for example, shared the base with combat soldiers from the Golani Brigade.

On October 7, approximately 700 soldiers were stationed along the border with Gaza when the attack began. The assault resulted in the deaths of 331 IDF soldiers and local security team members, along with 61 police officers. At Nahal Oz, in addition to the 15 female soldiers from the 414th observation unit who were massacred, 45 more soldiers lost their lives at the outpost. Additionally, nearly 20 fighters from the Nahal Oz reconnaissance unit were killed in action.

The Maariv daily reported that the women were already speaking up about strange activity on the border as early as May 2023, when they witnessed part of a large-scale, all-day Hamas drill that likely served as preparation for the October 7 attack. Throughout that summer, Hamas operatives were observed gathering less than half a mile from the border.

In an interview with KAN public broadcasting, two surviving Nahal Oz observer soldiers, Yael Rotenberg and Maya Desiatnik, shared their experiences leading up to that fateful day. Rotenberg recalled seeing many Palestinians dressed in civilian clothing approach the border fence with maps, examining the area and digging holes. Despite reporting these activities, she was told by her superiors they were farmers and not to worry.

Desiatnik described how, in the months leading up to the attack, Hamas terrorists trained at the border fence, increasing their frequency from once a week to nearly nonstop. She documented their training, which included driving tanks and even crossing the border into Israel. As border activity intensified, she sensed that an attack was imminent, but no one listened, she said.

“We saw what was happening, we told them about it, and we were the ones who were murdered,” Desiatnik told KAN.

Eshel recounted how his daughter frequently briefed him on the escalating situation. “When Roni would come home to visit, she would sit with me and tell me, ‘Dad, this camera does not work or that camera does not work. They [Hamas] are making holes in the fence, and no one is coming to fix them,’” he recalled.

At around 1:15 p.m., Tibon made it to Kibbutz Nahal Oz, joined the local security team and several units of special forces who were already deep in battle with the terrorists, and rescued his son and the rest of the family. Tibon said members of a paratroopers brigade arrived at the base around the same time, but it was already “burning like hell.”

“They tried to rescue [the soldiers], but unfortunately, very few were alive.”

Tibon said examples like the failure to listen to the observers’ warnings was the reason that Aharon Haliva [former director of the Military Intelligence Directorate] resigned. “At the end of the day, they were the eyes of the IDF in this region, and they saw, they saw—and arrogant and vain commanders in the Israeli intelligence shut them down. This is unforgivable.”

Raphael Cohen, director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND’s Project AIR FORCE, a nonprofit research organization, said that placing unarmed soldiers so close to one of Israel’s most volatile borders “strikes me as a truly criminal level of complacency”—even though the Golani soldiers stationed with them were armed.

Cohen said he has heard the narrative multiple times that the reason they were not listened to is the gender bias built into the IDF, which “strikes me as plausible, though I cannot point to any actual evidence.”

Lifschitz said she believes the women were not taken seriously because of both their gender and their rank. “We were 18- and 19-year-old girls,” she said. “Even though we know the whole area perfectly and could tell you about it in our sleep, we were not considered high enough ranked, so they did not listen. They liked to belittle us. It did not surprise me.”

While the presence of women in the IDF, including in combat roles, has increased in recent years, most, like those serving as observers, hold junior officer ranks, explained Shira Efron, the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation senior director of policy research at the United States-based Israel Policy Forum think tank. She said that women constitute about 45 percent of junior officer positions.

Their representation shrinks to approximately 20 percent at the lieutenant level and further declines to single-digit percentages among senior officers.

“Are women listened to?” Efron asked. “The question is if they are at the table to begin with.”

Of the 32 members of the Israeli General Staff under the leadership of Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, there are only three women: President of the Military Court of Appeals General Orli Markman, Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi and Military Secretary to the President Brigadier General Naama Rosen-Grimberg.

The education division of the IDF is composed mainly of women, yet it has never had a female head at the level of general. “The IDF is not in a place to lose talent after what happened to us,” Efron said.

Tibon echoes the view of many in noting that female soldiers showed up “big time” in this war, erasing any doubts about their capabilities in combat roles. There have been numerous accounts of female combatants playing key roles on October 7 and, since then, in Gaza.

One of the most notable examples was the all-female tank crew that was instrumental in maneuvering tanks from their post at the Egyptian border to engage with hundreds of terrorists at the Gaza border.

Following the war’s onset, there has been a significant increase in women enlisting in combat units. Although the IDF shares percentages rather than raw numbers for security reasons, in December 2023, figures revealed that combat units surpassed their targeted number of female recruits by more than 100 percent.

Subsequent data released by the IDF in April showed an even more substantial surge. For instance, the artillery corps exceeded its female recruitment target by 195 percent, indicating that for every woman it aimed to recruit, close to two actively pursued positions within the corps.

The border defense corps exceeded its recruitment target by 158 percent, the rescue and training unit by 170 per cent and the border police by 139 percent. In general, the IDF exceeded its female recruitment target by 157 percent, according to the April data.
At the same time, multiple news reports indicate that post-October 7, a growing number of female recruits are refusing to serve as observers.

“If they feel that they are doing something important, that they are secure and well trained and can protect them selves, they will come back with a huge motivation,” Tibon said. “If they feel no one respects them and they are not secure, they will not want to come.”
Lifschitz’s younger sister was expected to follow in her footsteps and serve as an observer. But just before she entered the army this winter, she requested a transfer and will serve as a driver in the IDF. She is in training and still does not know in which unit she will be placed.

“Nothing has changed since October 7,” Lifschitz said. “The headquarters at Nahal Oz moved to Re’im, but it is the same as at the other base. They don’t treat the observers differently—same system, same behavior,” she said, meaning that they still have no weapons and the hierarchy in the army has not changed.

“Why should my sister be an observer and go through what I went through?” Lifschitz wondered. “It’s a crucial task, but right now, it feels like my friends died for nothing. They were murdered for nothing.”

Back at the Nahal Oz command center, Eshel lights three memorial candles for his daughter Roni that glow brightly in the darkness. He wipes a tear from his eye.

“When I am here, all I want to do is cry—only cry,” he said. He and the other families of the tatzpitaniyot who died that day are pushing to turn the command center into a memorial.

And he, like Tibon, is calling for a full investigation as well as a change of leadership and practice. He acknowledged that uncovering the truth won’t bring Roni back, yet he says it can safeguard future female soldiers’ lives.

“I am Roni’s soldier now,” he said as he looked up toward the sky, teary-eyed but determined. “The girls are screaming from the ground: ‘Save our honor.’”

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These girls were so young, yet given massive responsibility. Why were their warnings ignored?

(Above Left) Everything in the command center, the operations hub where the field ob servers spent most of their working hours monitoring Israel’s border with Gaza, is blackened or melted—from the computers to the walls.
Lifschitz (in foreground) and fellow field observer soldiers sit at computer screens that monitor the Gaza border while operating a computer keypad with one hand.