While Israel Slept

Jul 17, 2026

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The narrative follows seven young IDF women observers stationed at Nahal Oz near the Gaza border, tasked with monitoring the frontier through screens. On October 7, missile sirens, border infiltration signals, and the destruction of cameras leave the soldiers blind as terrorists breach the barrier. Their broadcasts, attempts to respond, and subsequent deaths and escapes frame the account of a major massacre.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages233

Reading Time5 h 59 min

AccessFree to download

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in anyway. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, [please notify the publisher at: ](please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy)[us.macmillanusa.com/piracy](please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy). To the fallen and the heroes from October 7 and the war that followed INTRODUCTION A Country Asleep The female soldiers stood alongside the cold gray concrete slabs, their wrists bound with plastic zip handcuffs. Most were still wearing pajamas, and many had blood dripping down their faces from the battle that had just ended. For some, it was their own blood; for others, it was the blood of fifteen of their friends who had been mercilessly slaughtered before their eyes. The seven soldiers—Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniela Gilboa, Naama Levy, Ori Megidish, and Noa Marciano—were part of a unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) called tatzpitaniyot, Hebrew for“observers.” These women—just nineteen and twenty years old—were in the middle of their two-year compulsory military service in the IDF and were stationed at the Nahal Oz base a few hundred yards from Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. Known as the “eyes of the army,” the soldiers had one clear job: they manned screens inside the base that watched every inch along the tenuous and battle-scarred Israeli-Gaza border. Few international lines of demarcation have seen as much violence and bloodshed as this area in Israel’s southwest, and it was the job of these women to track everything. Ifa farmer ventured too far from his field, they called it in. If a shepherd appeared to be acting suspicious along the border, they alerted security forces. People would joke that they even tracked mosquitoes if they came too close to the fence. The role was created in the early 2000s when the IDF was still stationed inside Gaza, and the first observers were deployed inside the territory. It was a tedious task, predominantly assigned to female soldiers, who, according to military studies, possessed superior visual acuity and observational skills compared to their male counterparts. Most of the time, tatzpitaniyot made it into the news due to complaints over their working conditions. They spent hours sitting in front of screens, received few breaks, and lived on run-down bases. The job was not always exciting, but over time, the young women became experts in their region. They knew when something looked suspicious and out of the ordinary, and when it did, they told their superiors. At 6:29 A.M. on October 7, the piercing wail of missile warning sirens shattered the morning calm across southern Israel. The soldiers, many of them tired from night shifts and long workdays, were jolted awake by the cacophony of Iron Dome missile in

Jul 17, 2026

136

Upload by Sage