Roni Eshel told her father many times that she could see Hamas militants training for an attack near the Nahal Oz base where she served in a surveillance unit. The scale of the preparations left her frightened for her life.
She detailed the activity in daily reports over the summer and early autumn of 2023, raising the alarm together with dozens of other young women “spotters” – charged with watching a tiny section of the border in intense detail – who were posted along Israel’s border with Gaza.
A cocktail of chauvinism, arrogance and complacency meant their warnings were ignored or dismissed by senior commanders for the region, most of them men.
The senior officers were convinced Gaza was locked down by Israel’s layers of hi-tech defences, but 19-year-old Eshel proved a more accurate observer of the strip than many of the country’s top generals.
She paid for their mistakes with her life, killed along with 14 other spotters when their base was overrun. A last recording captured her detailing with calm precision the movements of Hamas fighters as they breached the border just 500 metres away.
Seven spotters were taken to Gaza. Their families and hundreds of other women who served in the same role over decades sprang into action, campaigning to bring them back.
Yahel Oren, 31, was one of them. This week she stood in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square wearing a T-shirt that said “once a spotter, always a spotter”, to watch the last of those women, Agam Berger, return to Israel under a ceasefire deal after 15 months in captivity.
One of the seven, Noa Marciano, was killed in Gaza. The remaining six have all returned – one rescued by the military in October 2023, and the other five released last month. Now the campaign group is shifting focus.
They want Israel, which has largely deferred an institutional reckoning with the security failures of 7 October, to have an official inquiry into why the spotters were so tragically ignored ahead of the attack, and abandoned to their fate that morning.
“Unfortunately I just have my story, my timeline,” Eyal Eshal, who often told his oldest daughter not to worry, because Hamas was no match for the IDF. “All of us believed we had the strongest army, but it was a joke.”
Roni herself mostly believed that, he said. Survivors said even when Hamas flooded over the border, the spotters were so sure they would be saved they agreed none of them would call their parents, to avoid worrying them.
That was despite months of watching Hamas preparation, and Israeli failures – broken cameras, predictable patrols, problems at the fence – with increasing apprehension.
Weeks before the attack, Roni told Eyal: “Dad I’m afraid, you must understand they know everything about us.” The details she told him also went into reports, and he wants to know what happened to them.
“For months before, none of the senior officers in the IDF listened to them, they didn’t pay any attention to them,” he said. “I miss her a lot. I think over and over what could have happened if someone had listened to them, to all the beautiful girls.”
The women who serve in the observation units are mostly young, in their late teens or very early 20s, often dubbed the “girls” by their families and in Israeli media. But their role is intense and demanding, mentally and emotionally.
“For four hours you just look at the screen, you can’t look to left or right, you report what you see. For four hours you are on call, available, then four hours looking at the screen again,” said Oren.
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They are unarmed, but are posted to the border for liaison with units patrolling on the ground. In Nahal Oz they kept different hours from the regular soldiers, and formed a tight unit, cooking together during shifts when the base kitchen was closed.
“Our next steps will be demanding the truth about what happened at Nahal Oz. For the sake of future spotters, we have to get answers,” Oren said.
Like many other Israeli women, she thinks the spotters died partly because of the sexism of a country which celebrates women soldiers but rarely promotes them to top command positions, and has never had a female minister of defence or internal security.
“I think the entire hierarchy needs restructuring, they need more women in high command. Even in the spotters divisions, the commanders were all men.”
Military chief Herzi Halevi has said he will step down in March, submitting a letter that laid out his “terrible failure” to protect Israel in 2023. But the government has batted away requests for a state commission of inquiry into the attacks.
Oren served in Nahal Oz around a decade before Eshel, but much of what she has learned about the events on and leading up to 7 October 2023 feels painfully familiar.
She served unarmed beside the Gaza border. She knew the shelter where the girls taken hostage were cornered by their captors; designed to protect them only from rockets, it didn’t even have doors to lock. She knew the nearby “war room” where those on shift were killed. And she knew the sense of being ignored.
Oren also warned of suspicious activity before a breach of the border in 2014, when Hamas fighters burst out of a tunnel and targeted a pillbox, but she got no response. Five Israeli soldiers were killed in the attack. “I don’t know where our reports went. Probably nowhere,” she said.
Spotters must be empowered to question anything about their security that doesn’t seem right, even if commanders try to dismiss concerns, she said. And though proud of her own work at Nahal Oz, she admits that if she had a daughter, she would probably try to stop her taking on the role.
“We felt a sense of security, which was false,” she said. “There is no trust now. I don’t even know if my son will become a soldier.”
