They were told that they were the eyes and ears of Israel. And they were. In the weeks before 3,000 Hamas terrorists stormed the Gaza border, murdered 1,200 people, and kidnapped more than 240, female soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.) reported that they saw major trouble looming.
Their male commanders ignored the women’s warnings.
The spotters are the human element in a high-tech network of cameras and sensors. Since Israel withdrew all its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip, in 2005, the diligent border observers have almost all been female soldiers, aged 18 to 21, who are recruited and trained by the I.D.F. to serve at the Israeli perimeter. They live and work at a military base barely three miles from the supposedly impermeable, billion-dollar fence and wall on the frontier that divides Gaza and Israel.
Throughout the summer, the women on duty noticed heightened activity there. Gaza residents who support Hamas were coming closer and closer to the fence with their slogan-shouting demonstrations. That could be dismissed as yet another propaganda stunt. But the surveillance teams sitting at their consoles were able to identify increasing participation by the Nukhba unit—whose name is derived from an Arabic word for “elite,” and indeed they are a well-trained and highly committed Islamic military brigade—and those men were not simply chanting slogans.
The New York Times on Thursday reported that Israeli intelligence acquired a Hamas battle plan for a massive border attack more than a year before October 7, a document the Israelis code-named “Jericho Wall.” Top officials continued to dismiss that blueprint as merely aspirational, even after a senior female analyst on the Gaza border warned in July about heightened Hamas training activity.
“I saw how they practiced riding motorcycles and pickup trucks loaded with weapons, and they were flying paragliders to simulate an attack that would cross into Israel,” one of the border-watchers said. “It was clear to me that they were planning a war against us.”
But according to some of her peers in Israel’s military intelligence, she was told by male superiors that she was a hysterical woman who didn’t understand what they knew. “Your role is to use your eyes, not your brains,” a commander mockingly told her. “Women are not good at analyzing.”
The diligent border observers have almost all been female soldiers, aged 18 to 21.
Anachronistic sexism will be a focus of official investigations into the many mishaps and self-deluding assumptions underlying Israel’s worst security failure, which led to the most Jews murdered in a single day since the Holocaust.
In the months and weeks preceding the brutal attack by Hamas on October 7, some of the women described almost prophetically what would happen. No one—not their Southern Command supervisors, not the top echelon of Israel’s military, and not even the intelligence community tasked with noticing every suspicious change—wanted to listen.
“We saw, we warned, and we also were murdered,” Yael Sternberg, an I.D.F. spotter, told a TV reporter in a quiet, bitter tone.
On that morning between 6:30 and 7:00, 15 of the female spotters were slain as Hamas terrorists rapidly swarmed into their bases after knocking out cameras and sensors on the border wall and fence.
Some of the soldiers were raped before being shot, according to Israeli forensics experts. Others were abducted, ISIS-style, on the same motorcycles and pickups they had seen on their screens. An undisclosed number are still being held in Gaza as hostages. Israeli commandos were able to locate and rescue one, Ori Megidish, who was then praised by I.D.F. leaders for providing valuable intelligence on the Hamas kidnappers.
“It was clear to me that they were planning a war against us.”
In recent days we talked to several spotters who have left active duty, and to the families of some who are still in uniform and who are not allowed to be interviewed. Their testimonies and eyewitness accounts, plus others in Israeli media, provide a chilling picture of the colossal failure of Israel’s male-dominated intelligence community.
The final test in the I.D.F. training for border observers is to let their imagination fly in simulating future scenarios. This is exactly what Vicki Seker did when she was a sergeant instructing spotters and their recruiters. “I bombarded them with questions,” Seker told Israel’s public television station, Kan 11. “I said, ‘Here we face incoming rockets, and here are 20 Hamas terrorists infiltrating a nearby kibbutz. Also, there are soldiers taken as hostages. How would you respond?’ My cadets were astonished. ‘Vicki, do not exaggerate. You are just drawing an imaginary scenario.’ But that is exactly what happened!”
October 7 was actually far worse than the war game she invented. Now that she is a civilian, Seker feels a need to say that the failures were “a result of complacency and contempt” by her military superiors.
Neither she nor her peers could break the wall of preconceived notions held by government, military, and intelligence leaders. Israel wanted to believe in its own myth that Hamas was weak, unwilling to confront the mighty I.D.F., and far more interested in creating jobs and prosperity in Gaza.
Some of the soldiers were raped before being shot, according to Israeli forensics experts.
A clinical psychologist, Ofer Grosbard, who worked for the huge Aman military-intelligence agency in 2021, says leaders there are “a homogeneous group with very few women in senior positions.” He observed that—in the field of intelligence—“women have less tendency for ego battles and are less self-righteous.”
Israeli law requires that every healthy man and woman enlist in the I.D.F. after graduating from high school. Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews are exempt from military service, yet they can volunteer, and a few do. Male conscripts must serve for 32 months, and females for two years.
Nevertheless, women can decline military duty if they declare they are living an Orthodox Jewish life, or if they prefer to do their national-service duty as teachers or social workers.
For the majority of young Israeli women who did join the I.D.F. in their country’s first five decades, their assignments were safe but boring secondary jobs. Female soldiers typically served as office clerks, and many were exposed to sexual harassment by male colleagues and especially commanders.
Only in the recent years of #MeToo have those abuses been exposed and condemned.
The attitudes toward women in the I.D.F. noticeably changed when Alice Miller, a young conscript, won a Supreme Court ruling that said she had to be admitted to the air-force training course for combat pilots in 1996. Miller eventually failed to pass the medical examination—although she did pass the grueling aptitude tests—but she did open the door to other women. A small number are now flying combat missions in both fighter jets and helicopters, and others joined army and navy units.
While the I.D.F. has been slowly adapting itself to a female revolution, Orthodox rabbis and their affiliated political parties have raised constant objections. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition leaned toward the extreme right, religious leaders have leveraged their clout.
“Your role is to use your eyes, not your brains,” a commander mockingly told her. “Women are not good at analyzing.”
One of the uncompromising voices is that of Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, who runs a military-preparation yeshiva on a settlement in the occupied West Bank. His sermons have included condemnation of the I.D.F. for encouraging multi-cultural values. He calls for eliminating combat roles for women and wants to prevent them from serving in the military in any role.
Three years ago, the military chief of staff, Lieutenant General Aviv Kochavi, gave in to pressure from Levinstein and other rabbis by halting the decision to include women in tank crews despite a successful pilot program.
However, in 2022, the decision was reversed and the army announced the adoption of all-female tank crews after another successful two-year pilot program.
The payoff came on October 7, now known to Israelis as Black Saturday, when the first military personnel to arrive at the scene where Hamas men were butchering soldiers and civilians were members of an all-female tank crew.
Their commander, identified only as Captain Karni to protect her security, became a hero overnight as the leader of the tankistiot (a new Hebrew term for tank women). “I opened fire with my upper machine gun,” Karni told Israel’s Channel 12. She then teamed up with other all-female crews, and they drove three tanks to Kibbutz Holit, where the attackers from Gaza were trying to murder and abduct people. The tanks opened fire with their cannon and machine guns, she said, killing as many as 50 infiltrators.
Tamir Pardo, the Mossad director from 2011 to 2016, promoted many women into positions as analysts, handlers of agents, heads of station in foreign capitals, and high-level managers at headquarters. “I found that women are much better than men in mastering the skills of spycraft,” Pardo told us.
Yet when it counted most, senior men in Aman refused to listen to the female analyst. A non-commissioned officer in Aman’s research department in charge of evaluating enemy weapons and capabilities, the analyst wrote three reports between April and October about military maneuvers by Hamas at the Gaza border fence. The essence of her findings has been leaked to the press, probably by advisers to Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant, who want to distance their bosses from failures and shift blame to intelligence leaders.
In her reports, the analyst described how Hamas’s war games included simulations of attacking and conquering entire kibbutzim: preparing to murder Israelis and take hostages. When she noticed Hamas leaders were present at the war games, she concluded that the preparations for a major incursion were complete. In one of her reports, she noted a communications intercept of Hamas members telling each other, “We have completed the killing of everyone on the kibbutz.”
A 30-year veteran in her field of analysis, the analyst distributed her reports all the way up to the Aman agency’s chiefs. Her direct commander praised her work, but he declared that the Hamas drills were “imaginary”—playacting by the terrorist group.
“No,” she replied, “this scenario is very real.”
Yossi Melman, a defense-and-intelligence analyst for the Israeli news organization Haaretz, and Dan Raviv, a retired CBS News correspondent, are the authors of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence. Melman is based in Tel Aviv; Raviv, in Washington