IDF to give parents of surveillance soldiers slain on Oct. 7 audio recordings from day before massacre

The IDF says that it will pass on communication recordings of surveillance soldiers killed in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught to the soldiers’ parents, who had petitioned the High Court of Justice for the documentation.

In a statement, the IDF says it updated the families of the surveillance soldiers who were killed at the Nahal Oz post in the Hamas attack that the military “is prepared to hand over the radio recordings from the last day before they fell, before the outbreak of the war, in which the voices of their loved ones can be heard.”

The decision ends a year-plus-long struggle by the bereaved families to receive the documentation of their daughters’ final moments before they were killed by Hamas terrorists.

The military says it will pass the recordings to the families as soon as possible.

The IDF says it also updated the High Court on the decision.

For weeks before Hamas’s onslaught — when thousands of terrorists streamed over the border, killing some 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 more — surveillance soldiers reported signs of activity along the restive Gaza border, situated a kilometer from them.

While the surveillance soldiers provide real-time intelligence information to soldiers in the field, earning them the name “the eyes of the army,” members of the all-female force believe that they were not taken seriously, due to their gender — an oversight that they say led to the deaths of 15 of their number at their base next to Kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7, 2023.

A further seven surveillance soldiers were taken hostage to Gaza, one of whom was rescued alive and another whose body was recovered; she was murdered in captivity.