They watch, armed with nothing but a telephone, knowing that if there is an attack, they will be the first to fall. They are all too aware that they are filling the shoes of their predecessors, dead or disappeared into Gaza.
Some new recruits have refused to serve as observer soldiers, risking jail for desertion rather than join the hundreds of recruits who work and sleep in female-only barracks for long, 12-hour shifts guarding Israel’s borders from Hamas. “It’s so scary, what happened to them could happen to me,” said Romi Fisher, who turned up to a recruitment centre in central Israel this week after receiving a call-up.
She said she would only take the decision whether or not to get on the bus that would take her to the army base at the last minute. “We are all afraid, none of us really want to do this,” she told Israeli television.
At least fifteen female soldiers were killed at Gaza border army bases on October 7, with some six others kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, including Liri Albag, 18, who was working her third shift as an observer soldier when she was taken.
Their release is still being negotiated, but after six months in captivity their families do not know if they are dead or alive. On Tuesday night Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, addressed the new recruits at the Tel HaShomer recruitment office, promising to bring the hostages home. “All of us together, all the soldiers, not just the female observers,” he told a hall of young, worried faces.
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On an Israeli military base just a stone’s throw from Gaza’s northernmost beach, some 90 new and old recruits from before and after October 7 sit in slot machine-like stations with a control stick to zoom in on their section of the border fence. Known as the “eyes of the military”, they must not look away from the screen, even for a second. Soldiers spend months learning every tiny detail of the sectors under their charge.
“On the 7th, four of our cameras in the field stopped working, and then all the electricity on the base went down, and then our phones didn’t work,” said Isabela, who was on the base at the time when some six Hamas frogmen came out of their boats and onto Israeli land.
“The girls all went into the command centre and locked the door. We were told not to open under any circumstances.”
But it wasn’t just the real-time intelligence that didn’t reach the higher army command. For weeks, if not months, observer soldiers had been warning of unusual Hamas activity on the border fence including training to take over an observation post.
“We have a moral, ethical obligation to correct what happened on that day, when we failed to defend this post. To be an observer soldier is one of the most important security roles in the protection of Israel,” Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesperson for the war, said.
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Women on the Yiftah military base say their protocols have all changed since October, despite many of the male reservists sent in as reinforcements having been sent home in recent months.
“Everything has changed,” said Ayala, 20, adding that their open fire instructions had been altered too, although she was not able to give details. “We still have our shifts, but everything that I saw, everything that I knew, has basically been deleted. All our manoeuvrability, our perspective, our awareness has changed completely.”
“I guess anything can happen though,” said Yuval, 20, a new recruit who joined the military in late October. “But I see the heavy security on the seas, precisely because of what happened. I sleep easily at night. I don’t think it can happen again.”
But parents sending their daughters to the post worry that they will still not be listened to. They say their children are sitting ducks, unarmed and positioned unnecessarily close to danger when they could be moved to a command centre further away from the borders.
“I hope the army has learnt. We are sending our children to this job with a heavy heart, not wholeheartedly,” said Liat, the mother of a new recruit who was to be sent to the northern border, where Israeli observer soldiers watch out for infiltration by Shia Hezbollah militia and their elite Radwan force, whose main task is incursions into Israel.
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At the post of Nahal Oz, video from October 7 showed soldiers, still in their pyjamas, huddled together in an open-doored concrete shelter, made against rockets. It was there that Private Ori Magidish, the only soldier rescued from Hamas captivity, was taken into Gaza. She has since returned to service.
The lookout soldier Roni Eshel, 19, was killed on that base, and her father told the new round of recruits that he hoped it wouldn’t happen again.
“I hope that something will change here. It has to change, we can’t see that being repeated, on a different day and a different place,” said Eyal Eshel, who says his daughter was left to burn when the base was set on fire.
But at the border Gazans still approach the fence, undetonated explosives lay undisturbed, and military checkpoints — including the Erez crossing, slated to open to ferry more aid into the Gaza Strip — still remain in tatters, with no approved plans to refurbish them.
“Our role is first and foremost to report. There hasn’t been too much to report since the 7th, but people still come to cross the fence sometimes,” said Ayala. “There’s not too, too much, but people are still crossing the fence, poor people, and farmers who have nothing to eat who come to collect cucumbers from the field, but still, not like they used to,” she said, under the watchful eye of her commander.
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“When they come, we report it, but we still depend on the [commanding] forces to either fire a warning shot, or not.”
