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..