The Heroism of Roni Eshel: What Really Happened at Nahal Oz IDF Base, October 7th
Two weeks ago, I met Eyal Eshel on a park bench in Herzliya, a middle-class city just north of Tel Aviv.
He is a common uncommon sight these days in Israel; a man in his 50s sporting IDF “greens”, as Israelis call the army uniform of the rank and file. In spite of there being no legal requirement for him to serve in the reserve forces at his age, Eshel, like so many “older” Israeli men, has chosen to step up in this dreadful time.
A father of three, his 19-year-old daughter, Roni, would have turned 20 on March 4th, had she not been murdered by Hamas monsters five months earlier. Roni was one of a small group of IDF intelligence officers serving as a “scout” at the Nahal Oz base in southern Israel. She and her team of female soldiers spent their days and nights staring at surveillance screens of a defined area of a very small land in the Gaza Strip abutting the border with Israel. I have visited these bases on numerous occasions, including when I served as Canada’s Ambassador to Israel from 2014-16. One young woman, I recall, explained to me that if a rock moved a few centimeters in her “area” she would notice immediately. Consider that this land, when not cultivated, is desert. Sand. Small rocks and stones. Everything is camouflaged by the muted desert palette, strong sun, flat landscape. It is a grueling job and one at which the scouts – known as “tatzpitaniyot” in Hebrew – excel.
These young women are selected based on a rigorous assessment process. Apparently, there is extensive scholarship – and empirical evidence - demonstrating that women are far more attuned to visual detail and observation than are men. And so, it was decided in the IDF that keeping eyes on Israel’s borders would fall to the women.
Their commanders, however, tend to be men. And, by all accounts, at the Nahal Oz base, there were some pretty hard-baked chauvinists.
Roni, her colleagues and a female commander had been observing alarming developments along the border with the Gaza Strip for much of the preceding year, and longer. There have been multiple, detailed news reports of the scouts waving red flags over highly unusual training drills undertaken by elite Hamas fighters over a prolonged period of time. In broad daylight. Right up against the border with Israel. Paraglider training. Drills in which they stormed mock kibbutz gates and army bases. Replicas of guard towers found on the Israeli side of the border were “attacked” in military exercises in the Gaza Strip. It was all out in the open. Brazenly so.
Then there was the long, detailed document in Arabic that IDF military intelligence obtained and analyzed a year prior to October 7th, which set out in granular detail how Hamas attacks would unfold. It was a very long, meticulously written report about this Hamas document was dismissed by senior IDF officials.
Repeated reports submitted by the scouts were disregarded by senior IDF officials. Hamas, the scouts were told, were a bunch of punks. Their “plans” were fantasies.
Major General Aharon Haliva, the Head of the Military Intelligence Directorate for the IDF, supported his subordinates in dismissing the reports of the scouts. A female commander at the Nahal Oz base was actually threatened that if she continued to press her concerns she would be court martialed.
On the night of October 6th and into the early morning hours of the 7th, the top brass of the IDF and Shin Bet Security service were alerted to a number of extremely serious developments. Several thousand Israeli SIM cards were reportedly activated in the Gaza Strip, simultaneously, around midnight. Since so many men from the Gaza Strip crossed into Israel on a daily basis to work in the agricultural industry in the south, they often used Israeli SIMs to facilitate communication while they were within the country. But typically there would be tens, maybe a few dozen SIMs activated in the course of a day or night. But not thousands. And not at exactly the same time. And certainly not on a Friday night. No one would be entering Israel from the Gaza Strip on a Saturday.
Eyal Eshel asks, pointedly: “Why were so many people talking on their phones and walking in the streets in Gaza? At midnight? They (IDF and Military Intelligence) knew something was up. And there were other things going on that we still can’t speak about.”
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