The British BBC publishes today (Monday) that in the months leading up to the Hamas attack on October 7, observers at the bases began to see very suspicious signs: raid training, staged kidnappings, and farmers behaving strangely on the other side of the fence.
After the failure of the observers, something much worse was revealed about Israel’s intelligence
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Noa, a pseudonym, said that the soldiers would pass on information about what they were seeing to intelligence officials and more senior officers, but could not do more than that. “We were just the eyes,” they testified. It was clear to some of these women that Hamas was planning something big – something that was, in Noa’s words, “a balloon about to burst.”
The BBC conducted conversations with a number of female observers about the escalation in suspicious activity they observed before the attack, the reports they submitted, and what they saw as the lack of response from senior IDF officers.
The British network also received documentation of WhatsApp messages that the soldiers sent in the months before October 7, when they talk about events that caught their attention at the border. For some of them it has become a dark joke: who will be on duty when the inevitable attack comes? These women were not the only ones who raised a cry.
The BBC also spoke with grieving families who lost their daughters, and with experts who see the response of IDF officers to these women as part of a broader intelligence failure. The IDF refused to comment on the article.
“The problem is that they are [הצבא] They didn’t connect the dots,” says a former commander of one of the border units. If they did, she says, they would realize that Hamas is preparing for something unprecedented.
The late Shai Ashram, 19 years old, was one of the women who served on duty on October 7. In a conversation with her family on the phone, when shots could be heard in the background, she said that “there are terrorists in the base and that “this is going to be a very big event”. Ashram was murdered by the terrorists, while others were taken hostage.
The female observers say that they took the responsibility assigned to them seriously. “Our mission is to protect all the residents. We have a very difficult job – you sit on duty and you are not allowed to blink or move your eyes even a little. You must always be focused,” says Noa.
In the months leading up to Black Sabbath, senior Israeli officials made public statements indicating that the threat from Hamas had been contained, but there were many signs along the border that something was not going well.
At the end of September, an observer in Nahal Oz wrote in a WhatsApp group of friends: “What, is there another event?”. A quick response came in a voice message: “Girl, where have you been? We’ve had them every day for the past two weeks.” As mentioned, the female observers watched those events in real time in the months leading up to October 7, which made some of them fear that the damned attack was indeed approaching.
“We would see them practicing every day on what the raid would look like,” testifies Noa. “They even had a tank model with which they practiced how to conquer. They had a model of a weapon on the fence, their training focused on breaching the fence and bombing it, and training on how to take over forces, murder and kidnap.”
Eden Hadar, another observer from the same base, remembers that at the beginning of her service, Hamas terrorists mainly engaged in fitness training in the area she was monitoring. But, in the months before the end of the service, especially during the month of August, she noticed the transition to “actual military training”.
At another base along the border, Gal (pseudonym) says she also watched the training increase. Once she even saw, using an observation balloon, how they replicated a model of an Israeli automatic weapon from the border “in the heart of Gaza”.
A number of women also describe bombs that were placed and detonated near the fence – apparently to test its strength. Video footage from October 7 would later show large explosions that occurred before Hamas terrorists entered Israeli territory on motorcycles and vans.
For a former observer, Roni Lifshitz, the most alarming thing she saw in the weeks leading up to the attack was a regular patrol of vehicles full of Hamas terrorists, who would stop at observation posts on the other side of the fence. She remembers the men “talking to each other, pointing at the cameras and the fence, and taking pictures”, and identified them as terrorists of Hamas’ Noh’ba force.
Some of the female observers who returned also reported increasing incidents of penetration attempts. In the messages he shared, they refer in code words to the trucks along the border, as well as to the fact that the IDF arrested people who tried to cross into Israel, a phenomenon that they say has been increasing.
In July, an observer sent her mother a message worded as follows: “I just finished my shift and we had an attempt to penetrate the border but a very stressful event… as if an event no one had ever encountered.”
The soldiers began to see strange changes in the behavior patterns along the border. Farmers, bird hunters and shepherds from Gaza began to move closer and closer to the fence, they testify. Currently, the female observers believe that those farmers gathered intelligence in preparation for the brutal massacre. “We know each of them inside out and know exactly their routine and hours. Suddenly we started seeing bird hunters and farmers we don’t know. We saw them move to new areas. Their routine changed, and they went and stuck to the fence. It seemed suspicious to us, we talked about it all the time.” .
In the end, the observers stated that they feared that a major attack was approaching but felt that their concerns were not taken seriously by the various ranks.