The female observers were not alone. Male soldiers, intelligence analysts, and reservists also documented Hamas’s unusually aggressive preparations — paraglider drills, mock border breaches, coordinated attacks with motorcycles and explosives. Several intelligence officers described the activity as preparation for a major assault. Higher command repeatedly assessed it as “aspirational” or beyond Hamas’s capabilities. Frontline voices closest to the threat were consistently overruled.
These young women, known as *tatzpitaniyot*, were part of the Combat Intelligence Corps. Despite the critical nature of their reconnaissance work, the position was classified as junior. After a handful of previous suicides in the unit, observers were deliberately left unarmed. They relied on nearby combat soldiers for protection. On October 7, that protection failed catastrophically.
When the attack came, many of these same observers were among the first victims. Fifteen were killed at Nahal Oz base alone. Others were taken hostage. Some were burned alive in the command center as militants set it on fire. Survivors have described the unbearable trauma of watching the massacre unfold on their own screens while powerless to stop it — knowing they had tried for months to prevent exactly this scenario.
The Pattern of Ignored Warnings
The failure went far beyond one unit. Combat soldiers and reservists near the border reported similar concerns. Some described being told not to escalate reports or “bother” senior officers. When the assault began, the invocation of the Hannibal Directive at multiple sites added another layer of chaos and moral injury. Soldiers later testified about firing on vehicles and buildings that may have contained Israeli civilians or hostages amid the confusion and permissive rules of engagement.
Dehumanization and the Cost of Division
Dehumanizing language appeared on both sides of the conflict. In Israeli military briefings and public statements after October 7, some rhetoric reduced Palestinians — including civilians — to “human animals” or obstacles to be cleared. Several soldiers spoke of the psychological toll this created. Warnings about excessive force or civilian harm were often sidelined. This does not excuse Hamas’s deliberate massacre of civilians on October 7. It does show how mutual dehumanization deepened the cycle of violence and trauma for everyone caught in the middle.
Ffemale observer survivors and former unit members stating they were treated with condescension and even sexism, with some saying they were told to stop "talking nonsense" or that they were just "spotters" who didn't understand what they were seeing. One surveillance soldier told Haaretz that when they raised concerns, "They [commanders] would laugh," and their opinions were not respected. 16 female surveillance soldiers from Unit 414 were killed during the attack on the base. Several were taken hostage. Some were released in January 2025, others left behind & tragically killed along with other Palestinians by the relentless ongoing Israel military attacks in Gaza.
Cascading failures
Saar Koursh, former CEO of the Israeli security firm Magal Security Systems described the lack of coordination as "The punishing system of control maintained by the Israeli government over Gaza prior to Oct. 7 collapsed because of a decadeslong failure to address structural and operational problems within the military-intelligence system, systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians that blinded Israeli analysts to Palestinian capabilities, rising politicization of military decision-making and a fixation with technological “solutions” as a substitute for political engagement to address the long-running conflict. The blind spots created by this approach bred systemic rot inside Israel’s security establishment. These failures ultimately enabled Hamas’ assault, shattering Israel’s image of invulnerability."Broader Soldier Testimonies
“We were told to shoot at anything that moved.” Multiple IDF soldiers who served in Gaza after October 7 have come forward with disturbing accounts of the rules of engagement they were given. One reservist described how his unit was ordered to treat entire areas as “kill zones,” where anyone present — even women and children — was considered a legitimate target unless proven otherwise. Another soldier recounted watching comrades fire on clearly unarmed civilians because “the instructions were to assume everyone is Hamas.”
Testimonies collected by Israeli media and human rights groups reveal a pattern: loosened restraints on lethal force, heavy reliance on AI targeting systems that accepted high civilian collateral damage, and commanders who explicitly discouraged questions about proportionality. Some soldiers spoke of profound moral injury — the lasting psychological damage of carrying out orders they believed crossed ethical lines.
Several soldiers described “Lavender” and “Gospel” AI platforms generated target lists with minimal human oversight, assigning scores that indicated the likelihood a person was a Hamas operative. One soldier recounted: “The system would spit out a name and a house, and we were told the collateral damage allowance was sometimes as high as 20 civilians for a single low-level target. We stopped questioning it because the machine had already decided.” Others spoke of the eerie detachment this created — watching a screen recommend strikes on buildings where families were known to live, then carrying them out with little time for verification.
The combination of loosened rules of engagement and AI-driven targeting left many feeling they had become part of a mechanized process that prioritized speed and volume over precision and humanity. For the female observers who had spent months manually watching every movement with their own eyes, the shift to algorithmic warfare only deepened the tragedy: the very system that ignored their human warnings later replaced human judgment with cold calculation.
One anonymous officer said quietly in a 2025 documentary: “We went in as protectors. We came out feeling like something inside us had been broken.” These accounts, combined with the ignored warnings of the female observers months earlier, paint a sobering picture: a chain of command that failed to heed danger signals before the attack, then responded with overwhelming and often indiscriminate force afterward.
As the war continues, so do the suicides. IDF publishes official suicide data only once a year, but year over year suicides are increasing to the point IDF is set to enact new guidelines for recognizing suicides linked to military service. Defense Ministry will decide on a case-by-case basis whether circumstances of a suicide are linked to trauma from military service, and will increase financial support for victims’ families.