IDF surveillance troops testify to glitches, neglect, no warfare training before Oct. 7
They had no weapons, no directives in case of base being overrun, says father of Noa Price, killed at Nahal Oz; ex-soldier at base describes broken cameras, malfunctioning balloons
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
IDF servicewomen tasked with monitoring the Gaza border in the weeks and months before the October 7 Hamas invasion had to contend with repeated technical glitches and were never trained on how to respond should their bases be overrun, several former observers, as well as the parents of their fallen comrades, testified on Tuesday.
The father of one slain surveillance soldier specified that the female soldiers had no weapons and were given no training on how to defend themselves, apparently because the possibility of the base being attacked was never considered by their superiors.
“There were many malfunctions, including some that took a very long time to fix. For example, cameras that fell, cameras that already worked less well, so we saw much less well,” Margaret Weinstein, a former soldier in the Border Defense Corps who served at the Kibbutz Nahal Oz military base until shortly before October 7, told an independent Civilian Commission of Inquiry in Tel Aviv.
She also cited malfunctioning surveillance balloons, which were meant to provide views of areas that would otherwise be “dead zones.” Asked how important these balloons were for their work, she replied: “Obviously, it’s critical.”
Weinstein — who was subsequently posted to the Urim IDF base, which was also overrun on October 7 — said that when she complained, “The answer I received was that there wasn’t enough of a budget.”
But despite the equipment glitches, it became increasingly obvious to the surveillance soldiers in the period proceeding October 7 that Hamas was preparing for something, she continued. “We felt that something was happening, it was in the air,” she said.
This included increased overt training activities and pickup trucks of Hamas fighters moving around in the border area “several times a week.”
Hamas fighters also detonated charges near the fence, she said, arguing that “it was clear that this was intended more to test us than to actually do damage — to test how long it takes for the charge to explode, and how we react to it. It was quite clear to us that this was their intention, to test us.”
Weinstein and her colleagues “forwarded everything” to their superiors, she said. But “we only report; we have nothing more to do with it,” she said. “We pass it on, and the job of everyone above [us] is to interpret… and draw their own conclusions.”
While surveillance soldiers provide real-time intelligence information to soldiers in the field, earning them the name “the eyes of the army,” several members of the all-female force have charged that they weren’t taken seriously due to their gender — a failure that they say led to the deaths of 15 of their number at their base in Kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7.
For weeks before Hamas’s onslaught — when thousands of terrorists streamed over the border, massacring some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages — the surveillance soldiers reported signs of activity along the restive Gaza border, situated about a kilometer from them.
Roni Lifshitz, another surveillance soldier who served at the Nahal Oz base until shortly before October 7, described similar conditions to those reported by Weinstein.
“During most of my time in service, more than a year, the observation balloons were down. The cameras broke down with high frequency,” she said. “They said there’s no money” for new cameras, she noted.
Amit Yerushalmi, an observer from the Nahal Oz base who was discharged shortly before the attack, recalled watching Hamas forces increase the pace of their training dramatically ahead of October 7.
“I saw exercises. It used to be training once a month, twice a month. It [then] became once a week, and gradually several times a week, and then several times a day. I also saw a change in where the training took place. There were times that the training did not take place in a [known] training complex, which also heightened suspicions,” she told the commission.
In addition, Yerushalmi recalled watching convoys of up to 30 pickup trucks, sometimes three times a day, driving along the border “with armed terrorists on them, with cameras [as well as] the flags of Hamas and Palestine.”
“We were sure that [their IDF superiors] were listening to us and doing something with our information. In light of the result, I understand that they did nothing with it,” she added.
She also indicated that the soldiers were given no instructions about what to do to defend themselves in the event of an attack on their base. “We were supposed to continue sitting in front of the screen in the command center,” she said.
Erez Price, the father of Staff Sgt. Noa Price, 20, one of the surveillance soldiers killed on October 7 when Hamas terrorists overran the Nahal Oz base, also highlighted the lack of training.
He described arriving in Nahal Oz in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas killings there to find “dozens of soldiers outside the base” waiting for members of the elite Shaldag unit to clear it.
“I introduced myself as the father of a soldier and asked the officers why they weren’t going in,” but was threatened with detention by an officer, he said.
“I went back and looked for a weapon, a helmet and vest. I asked one of the soldiers to ‘give me a weapon,'” he continued.
Asked why the surveillance soldiers were unarmed, he told the commission that they had no training and no weapons.
“They knew how to run for cover [from rocket attacks]… they weren’t prepared for a raid,” he said.
The testimony makes it “obvious that a state commission of inquiry must be established,” declared Eyal Eshel, whose daughter Sgt. Roni Eshel, 19, a soldier in the Border Defense Corps, was killed on October 7.
Eshel was one of the initiators of the grassroots Civilian Commission of Inquiry, which was established this summer in response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to establish, as long as the war continues, a state commission of inquiry to investigate the failures that enabled the October 7 attacks.
He has long been critical of the IDF for its role in his daughter’s death, telling lawmakers in January that his daughter “is no more because they didn’t listen to her.”
An external investigative committee is needed “to bring the truth to light because nothing else can give us all rest,” he declared at the time.
Eshel told the inquiry on Tuesday that his daughter had also told him about some of the problems along the Gaza border, such as non-functioning cameras, but had asked him not to contact the IDF on her behalf so as not to embarrass her.
“I listened but didn’t act. I told her we have the best and strongest army in the world,” he recalled.
