Female Israeli soldiers had warned for months that Hamas was planning something. They weren’t taken seriously.
By Mary Ann Sieghart
A few months before 3,000 Hamas fighters blasted across the Israeli border, pillaged kibbutzim and raped and murdered their way through the Supernova festival, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostages, a veteran military intelligence officer on the southern border with Gaza warned that Hamas was planning exactly such an attack.
The officer was a woman. Her colonel, as the New York Times reported, dismissed her concerns as “imaginary”.
And for several weeks before the assault on 7 October, according to Haaretz, dozens of the female soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tasked with monitoring the Gaza border were also warning their superiors that Hamas fighters were rehearsing an attack involving drones and paragliders, targeting tanks and border posts, and breaching the fence. Again, they were brushed off.
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