Protesters in Tel Aviv hold a banner on September 14 bearing the images of female Israeli field observers who were captured by Hamas and taken to Gaza during the October 7 attack. Photo / Heidi Levine, Washington Post
For the past year, Israeli soldiers stationed atop a windswept mountain abutting the border with Lebanon have watched the enemy deploy men and missiles.
The members of this female-only army unit, known as field observers, have tracked Hezbollah fighters as they drove through narrow alleyways and green valleys, setting and resetting launchers, approaching the border fence and pulling back. The observers, most between 18 and 20 years old, have been responsible for identifying and reporting many of the 10,000 drones, mortar rounds, rockets and antitank missiles that have streaked across Israel’s northern skies since October.
They are the eyes of the military along Israel’s embattled borders, monitoring multiple screens around-the-clock to supply reconnaissance that guides forces on the ground. They flag changes in routines of the men they observe and investigate intelligence alerts sent from above.
But a year after the Hamas-led October 7 attack, these young women say Israel is still not doing enough to reckon with the kind of threats that exploded across its southern frontier on that awful morning, when gunmen streamed across the border from Gaza. Field observers near Gaza were among the first to sound the alarm about Hamas’s preparations for a large-scale attack, and among the first to be killed and kidnapped during what turned out to be the deadliest day – and largest intelligence failure – in Israel’s history.
In recent weeks, the Israeli military has dramatically expanded its military campaign in Lebanon – pummelling Hezbollah with airstrikes; assassinating the group’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah; and, on Monday, launching a ground operation aimed at restoring security to the northern border.
Still, despite Israel’s recent run of military successes, many field observers say they are ignored by their commanders, as they were before Hamas attacked; left vulnerable in the north after being abandoned to die in the south.
Parts of their ordeal on October 7 were captured, indelibly, on Hamas militants’ body cameras. Inside the Nahal Oz base, less than a mile from the border with Gaza, gunmen lined the field observers up against a wall, still in their pyjamas, some with faces bloodied, before loading them into trucks and driving back to the enclave. The field observers in the north watching Hezbollah fighters, who Israeli officials say have been formulating similar plans for years, fear the same fate could befall them.
“We are unprotected, which is a problem for us, but it is also dangerous for our work, which is very important,” said an observer near the border with Lebanon, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with Israeli military protocol. Her superiors, she said, “only want to shut us up, to not come to them with complaints, so they’re ignoring us even more”.
The Washington Post spoke to seven current and former field observers and their parents, and to five Israeli military experts and intelligence officials past and present, about the unit’s behind-the-scenes role – and the assertions of its members that they have been silenced and sidelined. Many field observers attribute this partly to ingrained misogyny in the Israel Defense Forces, where men dominate the decision-making ranks. More broadly, the observers point to a top-heavy, unwieldy bureaucracy that prioritized technology over field intelligence in Gaza and that remains resistant to structural change and accountability.
The IDF declined to comment for this article, saying it could not speak to October 7 or its aftermath while investigations are ongoing.
Of the about 1200 people killed that day, 15 were field observers from Nahal Oz. Seven other observers were taken hostage. One was later rescued by Israeli forces; another was killed by her captors in November, the IDF said. Five remain in captivity. Their parents have been informed that they are among the few dozen hostages still believed to be alive, even as hopes of a ceasefire and hostage-release deal continue to fade.
In the weeks after the attack, as a broken country searched for answers, it became clear that the observers in Nahal Oz had been warning of something unprecedented – and were disregarded.
For months they had logged reports about Hamas ramping up its military activities: training several times a week, then several times a day; hoisting Palestinian and Hamas flags as they drove in convoys up and down the length of the Gaza Strip. These were not routine drills, the observers told a civilian commission of inquiry in August, but complex military exercises that would soon be put in motion to devastate more than 20 Israeli communities.
“There are things that I know that you don’t. They will not stop attacking anytime soon,” Roni Eshel, a field observer in Nahal Oz, told her mother in a call recorded two weeks before the attack and shared with The Post. Violent demonstrations by Gazans were mounting, she said, with explosions set at the border fence. “I’m exhausted already,” Eshel confided to her mother. “I don’t have the energy to be here.”
She was killed on the morning of October 7.
The field observers said they were confident that something big was about to happen because they understood their enemies. They knew their names and faces, as well as the intimate rhythm and routine of their days. But when the women tried to send alerts up the almost exclusively male chain of command, they said, they were told they didn’t have access to the full picture. Superiors said that the observers’ posts offered limited visibility and that there was no way they could connect the dots.
“It is a male army, where the ‘girls’ are seen as hysterical, where the commanders say, regularly, ‘If you continue to send these alarms, you will be put in jail,’ " said Gili Yuval, who served as a field observer in the early 2000s, when Israeli dismantled its settlements in Gaza and pulled its forces.
Since October 7, she has spearheaded a loosely organized network of current and former observers that provided such basics as food and clothes to victims in the immediate aftermath of the attack, when the state was mostly absent, and helped to foster a sense of sisterhood and community.
“It is very hard not to factor in the biases of chauvinism,” said Shira Efron, policy research director at the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group. “The men around the table decided to disregard anything coming from this female-only unit.”
The IDF declined to comment on why the field observers’ warnings went unheeded and on claims that gender bias played a role.
Gili Shrvit, 20, was an observer at another post along the Gaza border, in Kissufim. On the morning of October 7, she sat at her workstation, shaking and crying as she reported the unfolding horrors: Hundreds of Hamas gunmen had stormed their fence, then shot out their cameras, then entered their base.
“We were calling our superiors, telling them we are about to die,” she recalled. “They said they have no one for us.”
They crouched under their workstations, Shrvit recalled, without weapons to fight back. She said their commanders, 20 miles away, told them combat soldiers were ensnared in ambushes and could not be spared. As bloodied soldiers were dragged in from outside, the women improvised tourniquets, Shrvit said, but many of the wounded were beyond saving.
When her camera “miraculously” switched back on, Shrvit said, she immediately got back to work, reporting everything she saw: the hundreds of Hamas-led forces becoming thousands, traversing back and forth from Gaza to the surrounding communities. She watched Shlomo Mansour, now 86, being taken from his home in Kissufim into Gaza, where he remains. He is Israel’s oldest hostage in the war.
At the heart of Israel’s failure, Shrvit believes, was its rigid and unresponsive military bureaucracy. The top brass, far from the front lines, instinctively mistrusted the troops on the ground and the female observers who supported them, she said. While her team tried to build intelligence on the militants, shepherds and farmers who crisscrossed their area of surveillance, Shrvit said, their commanders would direct them to divert their focus – in some cases asking them to follow targets they knew from experience were incorrect.
“They would see what I see, and they would always think they knew best,” she said.
Shrvit returned to her position a month after the attack, haunted by nightmares, and slept at her workstation for three months. In August, she was discharged.
“The wasteland of chaos that we experienced, they’ve forgotten already,” she said. “Which means that we are compromising our national security, again.”
The confusion and lack of foresight on such stark display on October 7 was more than two decades in the making, according to current and former officials, who say the work of field observers was deprioritised alongside a steady erosion of Israel’s visual and human intelligence apparatuses in Gaza.
In 2001, the observers were transferred outside the purview of Aman, Israel’s military intelligence agency, to the IDF Combat Intelligence Collection Corps, though they continued to perform the same tasks. Around the same time, the mixed-gender unit was, for reasons still unclear, transformed into an all-female force.
The IDF “takes the girls as cheap labour”, said Uzi Arad, a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because “women’s analytical capabilities are greater than men’s”.
When Netanyahu rose to power, eventually becoming the country’s longest-serving leader, he championed a radical reconceptualization of Israel’s approach to Hamas – pursuing a strategy of containment that relied on shoring up the group’s government in Gaza with financial support from intermediaries, while keeping its military capabilities in check with occasional bombing campaigns.
“It was self-delusion,” Arad said. “And there wasn’t anyone who challenged it.”
Netanyahu and his military chiefs told Israelis that technology could deliver ironclad deterrence. His proof of concept was a billion-dollar fence along the border with Gaza, completed in 2021, that was meant to seal off the Hamas threat. Millions more were poured into cutting-edge SIGINT, or signals intelligence, units, which afforded soldiers physical distance from the field.
Israel had set Hamas back by “a decade”, Netanyahu told a cheering crowd of IDF officers four months before October 7.
All the while, Israel’s traditional field intelligence system in Gaza - powered by informers, field observers and forces near the border – was subject to constant budget cuts, according to an Aman adviser who previously served as a senior official in Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters.
Now able to put the tiny, blockaded enclave under constant surveillance, Israel began cultivating fewer sources inside Hamas, the former Shin Bet official said. In 2020, Israel phased out a program in Gaza that collected information from ordinary Palestinians about unusual or suspicious activity.
“They wanted to be leaner, higher-quality, not to have to deal with all the thousands of puzzle pieces that need to be put together by on-the-ground sources, which led to the lowest amount of human intelligence in Gaza in Israel’s history,” he said.
“In the end, we went to sleep.”
Despite their frustrations, the field observers never stopped believing in the work.
“It was not glamorous, but they learned that the job required a lot of knowledge and understanding about the field,” said Ayelet Levy, mother of Naama Levy, one of the five observers still held hostage by Hamas.
None of the women in her daughter’s unit received weapons, Ayelet said, or were trained in how to respond during a kidnapping. But Naama and her colleagues tried to engage with the gunmen who overran their base, asking them questions in English. “I have friends in Palestine,” Naama is heard saying in one of the videos filmed by militants that morning, her face bloody from shrapnel injuries.
“She tried to show them – I am a peace seeker,” her mother said from their home in Raanana, where she keeps Naama’s room organised, waiting for her return. “Now, we understand they were alone, they were abandoned.”
For 11 months, Israel’s northern front was treated as an afterthought, field observers there said, even as Hezbollah rockets and antitank missiles forced tens of thousands of people from their homes.
In April, when Iran launched an aerial attack on Israel in retaliation for a deadly Israeli strike near an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria, observers on the northern base were refused updates as they hunkered down, one of them said, forced to check their phones for news during brief breaks. In September, as Israel began to ramp up operations against Hezbollah, IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi visited the post but refused to meet with the observers.
“We are 100 observers,” she said. “But for him, we are like air.”
Israel’s ground invasion of southern Lebanon, its first since 2006, is aimed at dismantling the military capabilities of Hezbollah’s elite units along the border, officials say, ensuring they are unable to carry out an attack in the north similar to the October 7 one.
But observers’ families say that goal still feels far off and, in the meantime, their daughters remain in harm’s way. Marganit Erez, a mother of a field observer at the base near Lebanon, is among a group of parents who have petitioned the Supreme Court of Israel to order the military to move the unit farther south, away from immediate danger.
“The IDF is not taking the steps to ensure that the catastrophe will not repeat itself,” Erez said.
Her daughter and the other observers in the north often sleep four hours a day, she said, working double and triple shifts because so few women are willing to serve there.
The doors of their bomb shelters have no locks – the shelters are designed to repel rockets, not gunmen – and, with protocols varying from base to base, the observers are given weapons only if they file a special request. There are bars over the bathroom windows, one of the few means of escape for observers in Nahal Oz during the Hamas assault. When the women ask about possible infiltrations by militants, they are brushed off, they say, or told such things cannot happen.
“The arrogance and a refusal to take responsibility” that was evident before October 7 “is absolutely still there”, the former Shin Bet official said.
Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari insisted at a January news conference that “observers are among the most important roles in the security of the state of Israel, and it will continue to be”. He said the army was committed to correcting its “failure” to protect them.
But field observers and their families – echoing the pain across this angry, grieving nation – have lost faith, threatening the social contract that is at the heart of Israel’s national identity.
“We are willing to do a lot for our country,” Erez said. “But the IDF has broken its fundamental oath.”
Lior Soroka and Alon Rom contributed to this report.
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