IDF Ignored Female Soldiers’ Warnings Pre-Oct. 7. Then They Were Massacred

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, a year since October 7th, 101 hostages are yet to be brought home from Gaza. This includes five female Israeli soldiers who were stationed at the Nahal Oz base near the Gaza border fence that day, and Hamas killed 15 in their unit. Months before the attack they had reported suspicious activity by the militant group but their warnings were ignored. In a recent report for The Wall Street Journal, correspondent Anat Peled investigates that failure and the tragedy that ensued as well as the wider implications. And she discusses all of that now with Michel Martin.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Anat Peled, thank you so much for joining us.

ANAT PELED, REPORTER, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: Before we get into the details of your reporting, we are speaking now, we are acknowledging it’s been a year since the October 7th Hamas-led attack on Southern Israel. There have been a number of memorials. I assume there were memorials and commemorations happening throughout the country. You went to one of them. Would you just tell us about it?

PELED: Sure. So, I attended one memorial in the evening, and it was organized by families of hostages and bereaved families, you know, people killed on October 7th. And this was a ceremony separate from the government. They couldn’t agree on a — you know, a unifying ceremony. And it was just giving space to all the stories. I mean, not all of them, but a lot of stories of victims, you know, people who survived, returned hostages. It was just a very painful kind of way to reflect on a difficult year that Israelis have had.

MARTIN: It is interesting that the government wanted to have one observance and the family members — many of the family members wanted a different one. Can you just describe — what was the point of difference? Do you know?

PELED: Definitely. So, basically, the government is very contentious in Israel. It doesn’t have very high approval ratings and polling shows that if elections were held right now, Netanyahu would not be able to form a coalition. The families couldn’t agree with the government on a common ceremony and the government decided to hold a pre-recorded ceremony without an audience. And the families felt and other critics felt that this was to avoid protests during the ceremony, and they wanted a live audience. And so, they tried to, you know, come to an agreement, but at the end, they held their own ceremony. And it just kind of gave voice to their pain.

MARTIN: Interesting. There’s a lot right there, isn’t there?

PELED: Yes.

MARTIN: We specifically wanted to talk with you about a report that you filed for The Wall Street Journal this week. It’s titled, How the Massacre of Ignored Female Soldiers Came to Symbolize October 7th Failures. I have to say, you know, of all the things that I’ve read and all the reporting that I’ve seen about the events of October 7th, this has to be just one of the most painful. For so many reasons. What was the specialized unit? What were they tasked to do?

PELED: So, these young women are known as field observers, (INAUDIBLE) in Hebrew, and their job is basically to watch borders. So, they will be placed in dangerous areas, for example, near the border with Lebanon, with Gaza, you know, in the West Bank, and they will have to literally sit in front of screens, and they watch, each woman, you know, part of the border area, and also a few hundred meters into Gaza, and they cannot take their eyes off the screen. It’s forbidden. So, if they have to go, you know, to the bathroom, they have to be replaced. And what they did is they basically just had to alert, that means forces in the field. They have phones and radio next to them. And if they saw something suspicious on their screens, they would have to alert the forces in the field that something was happening.

MARTIN: Why is this an all-female unit?

PELED: Right. It didn’t used to be, but it got changed I think around 2001.

MARTIN: The heart of your piece is this, these soldiers sent repeated warnings of unusual and suspicious activity at the borders. Your reporting says that these warnings were sent up, it’s not that they didn’t see them, but they were repeatedly ignored. In fact, we focused on a number of the soldiers, particularly one named Maya Desyatnik (ph). Walk us through what they were seeing, for people who haven’t seen your piece yet. Walk us through what they were seeing and what happened when they made these reports.

PELED: Yes. So, Maya (ph) is one of the observers who actually survived, one of two observers who survived that day. And what she was telling me and others who were not on the base that day is that they were seeing months leading up to the October 7th attack, basically practice drills. So, one young woman told me that she saw a trainee exercise, including a mock tank and a fake kidnapping going on inside Gaza, not too deep, because then they wouldn’t have seen it. Other — another girl said that she basically saw people in — dressed in all black and their face covered, which they were taught to identify as part of the Nukhba unit, which is the Hamas elite unit, and they were pointing at different observation points and then drove away. And these young women basically saw tons of activity. They saw large groups of Palestinians coming closer to the fence several times a week. They would try to breach, they would be armed, they would play with the cameras, and these young women were alerting their superiors that this was happening. It’s important to note that on Friday, October 6th, it stopped. There was silence that day. And that also probably should have raised alarms.

MARTIN: What happened to this space and this group of soldiers?

PELED: Yes, it’s really tragic on October 6th. They have a celebration. They have a party because one of the girls, Shahaf Nisani, it’s her last night on the base. And they have a meal. It goes until 11:00 p.m. And so, the girls get up at 4:00 a.m. And around 6:30, they start to hear sirens. Now, it’s not usual sirens. It’s tons and tons of sirens, indicating that barrages of rockets are coming in. So, we have the situation room, which is where they have their stands and they sit in front of the screens and watch the border of Gaza. And so, those young women are watching the border, and suddenly, they see dozens of militants breaching, heavily armed with RPGs, grenades. We would learn later that 100 — more than 150 would be — would come in and — into this space, only the space. And so, the young woman are calling, you know, kind of frantically, and we have some recordings of this, calling their superiors, calling the forces in the field saying, guys, we have — they’re breaching, they’re breaching the border. What happens is they also breached the base and they were never prepared for an invasion of the base. And so, Maya (ph), who’s a survivor, told me that they basically hid. The young woman in a small office for six hours. Militants were outside, a few armed soldiers tried to kind of fight them off, because these women are all unarmed, and failed. And the militants threw in grenades and set the situation room on fire. What happens is basically everyone is killed there and burned basically alive. Maya (ph) manages to escape through a small bathroom window. She and a few others. Now, elsewhere on the base, we have the rest of the observers who are not on duty. They’re in their pajamas, and we also have videos of this. They escaped to a small concrete shelter where they basically send their parents goodbye messages, because they understand they hear shooting around them, they understand the situation. Then the militants enter, throw grenades, they shoot and they kill everyone, except for seven young women who are taken to Gaza. It’s important to know that before they were taken to Gaza, Hamas militants made a video of them. Basically, they’re sitting bloodied in front of a wall and you can — this video has come out and you can watch it, but basically, what they’re looking at is the bodies of their friends. And that hasn’t come out. And then they’re taken to Gaza. So, basically, this — they’re killed. These girls who warned for months.

MARTIN: It’s almost disrespectful to talk about the numbers, but just so that we understand the scope of this, how many people were killed that day in this gruesome fashion?

PELED: We know at least eight other military bases and outposts that the Israeli army were breached that day. In this space, over 50 soldiers were killed, of the of those soldiers, 15 observers, and they were unarmed. And seven of the observers, additionally, we’re taking to Gaza.

MARTIN: Do we know whether any of these women are still alive?

PELED: So, two have come back. One alive in an Israeli rescue mission. One dead. Her body was retrieved. The five remaining women are believed to be alive. And freed hostages that I’ve spoken to saw them in Gaza wounded, but alive around day 50. So, that’s many days ago. But —

MARTIN: Many days ago.

PELED: But they still could be alive.

MARTIN: Just as — there’s so much here to try to understand, like, first of all, why are they unarmed?

PELED: Yes, they weren’t considered combat soldiers. So, only combat soldiers in the Israeli army will — you know, have arms with them. If you’re not a combat soldier, if you’re a cook, if you’re an intelligence, you may not have arms. That’s one of the questions that the parents are asking. And the IDF is going to have to investigate.

MARTIN: Well, why was the base so lightly defended? You said — so, the women themselves were not armed. The observers themselves were not armed. OK. So, you said that they were classified as noncombatants. OK. But why was the base, which was a forward — at a forward position so lightly defended?

PELED: We don’t have a good answer to this. The IDF is conducting a more tactical investigation about what went wrong that day, and it hasn’t released the results of that yet. But we don’t know. There weren’t enough forces on that day. It was a holiday. It was a weekend. And so, it seemed to have been more emptied out. We don’t have a good answer to that. That’s part of the tragedy.

MARTIN: And the third and most important question, obviously, which you’re reporting clearly raises and which the families clearly want to know is, why did no one listen to them?

PELED: Yes. So, first of all, say the parents are very upset about this. And these young women have become a symbol for Israel’s intelligence failure of October 7, which is the worst in its history and the failing to protect them. The operational failure. There’s two things we can touch at. One is structural. So, basically, as I said in the beginning, these women were not really seen as part of the intelligence community in the military. So, in the military, you have 8,200 unit, which does kind of more fancy technology-based signals intelligence, which is considered very valuable by the military. And you also have the Mossad, Israel spy agency, you have the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. These women, over the years, were basically taken out of that community and treated more as kind of tactical low-level intelligence. We don’t really need what they’re doing. We have fancy stuff. We have classified stuff that will, you know, take care of what we need. And so, these women were basically alerting. And at one point, I spoke to a young woman who wasn’t on the base that day, and she was a commander of the observers. So, she compiled intelligence reports at the end of each shift with what kind of was unusual. And she even called up an intelligence number that she had. She didn’t know exactly who it was, but she basically asked, what’s going on? And they said, oh, nothing. You have nothing to worry about. She trusted them. So, that’s one thing. That’s one of the failures. And the second thing, I mean, a lot of people asked me, you know, they were a woman. Was it because misogyny, you know? And I think it does play a role here, but I do want to say that Israel has a really big intelligence failure here. It’s not just about — I think men were also ignored that raised alarm, and it’s more complicated.

MARTIN: You know, I understand why you’re saying that there is sort of an array of failures there and over reliance on sort of high tech — high — you know, high tech sort of intelligence tools and so forth. But, you know, human intelligence has been a hallmark of Israeli defenses for — since forever, hasn’t it? You could see why people are asking, is it that they didn’t — they ignored what they had to say because they didn’t believe these women would know what they were talking about? I know you, you interviewed intelligence officials in the course of your reporting. Are you really convinced that gender wasn’t a factor here?

PELED: No, I think gender did play a — was a factor here. I think it did. They’re young woman and they were seen as kind of the bottom of the barrel doing the most basic job and not high rank. And yes, maybe just complaining. And yes, I think misogyny did play a role in this.

MARTIN: I know that the prime minister, Prime Minister Netanyahu, has said that inquiry should wait until the military campaign is over, but is that really true? Is an inquiry — are there any inquiries going on? And how do the families feel about that? Do they feel that the government is taking this seriously?

PELED: They don’t. And they’re very upset about this. One of their big demands is to open a state commission of inquiry, which is the highest level of inquiry you can basically conduct in Israel. And it has the authority to kind of point fingers and say, this person should not continue in their position. But yes, the government has not committed a year later to do — to open such an inquiry. The army is doing its own investigation, but that’s really tactical. That’s about improving its own, you know, how do we continue in the fighting and learn from this? The parents have told me that they want, you know, people in the government and the army to take responsibility and that there should be some sort of justice. And the parents have really — with this demand, they’ve kind of come together as a group and they’ve done all kinds of things to try to get this done. They’ve secured meetings with the president, with the prime minister, who did not commit in their meeting in July, that he would open such an inquiry. And also, some of the families, including A. L. Esho (ph), who is one of the kind of leaders and his daughter died in the attack, he helped open a civilian commission of inquiry, which is kind of a mock inquiry to kind of push the government to open its own. But they’ve also heard witnesses. So, they’re kind of trying all these tactics. But at the end, they don’t feel like it’s getting anywhere and they’re frustrated.

MARTIN: Obviously, the military campaign in Gaza has been going on for a year now, you know, literally since the day after the October 7th attack. But now, there’s a new front open in Lebanon. A very attention getting operation just recently involved planting these explosive devices in the pagers of that — were handed out to, you know, certain sort of Lebanese officials and so forth. They were able to, you know, assassinate certain high-level officials in third countries with a fair degree of precision. And yet, they didn’t see this massive operation being developed on their own borders. So, I’m just wondering how these recent events are landing with these families.

PELED: It’s part of the structural failures that the Israeli — the country is dealing with. So, Israel, for years, just invested most of its resources in the — it’s — in its northern border with Lebanon, especially Hezbollah, Iran, while Hamas was seen as deterred by the Israeli government, by the military, they thought they weren’t as capable. And so, that’s also another layer of this that we didn’t really discuss. But we’re seeing these incredible capabilities, intelligence capabilities in — you know, in Lebanon with Hezbollah that took years and year and resources to build. So, that’s part of it. And it just kind of shows the difference here. You know, we’re seeing such impressive capabilities and just such a disaster in — with Gaza. The second thing I would say is that there’s still five, you know, female observers in Hamas captivity. And so, the families that I spoke to feel that they’ve been forgotten and abandoned by the government because the government has moved on to this new front. And, yes, it says that it will put pressure on Hamas and maybe it will help secure a deal, but I’m not sure the families buy that so much anymore. I think that they feel like, you know, the country’s moving on to a new front. And Gaza has been left behind and their loved ones.

MARTIN: Before we let you go, could you just summarize why this is so reflective? You think this particular incident is so reflective of the bigger picture, the broader failures that led to October 7th?

PELED: So, this is the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history. And, you know, 1,200 people were killed, around 250 taken hostage. We’ve never seen anything like that. And, you know, Hamas had capabilities. Israel discovered detailed maps of military bases, of kibbutzim. But it’s not just Hamas’ capabilities, there’s a huge failure here by the Israeli State, by the Israeli military, the security establishment to see this coming. As Israel keeps fighting and this war keeps expanding, we’re not — I mean, the state hasn’t taken time to really reflect, and society hasn’t really taken enough time to reflect on these failures. And these women represent the tragedy and the cost of what happened and they’re the victims and their families, a year later, just want answers. That’s all they’re looking for. And they can’t get that. They actually had to start investigating this on their own because they felt they were not getting answers from the military or from anyone else. And they really just interviewed anyone they could. And by the time the military came back with some of its first answers, some of the families already knew better than them what was going on because they had just done their own reporting in a sense.

MARTIN: Anat Peled, thank you so much for speaking with us.

PELED: Thanks for having me.