They were Israel's eyes on the border, but their warnings about Hamas went unheard
They were Israel’s eyes on the border with Gaza, but former soldiers say their warnings about Hamas activity ahead of the Oct. 7 attacks were ignored.
TEL AVIV — They were Israel’s eyes on the border with Gaza, but former soldiers from a military observation unit say their warnings about suspicious Hamas activity ahead of the Oct. 7 terror attacks were repeatedly ignored. A year later, they are still seeking answers.
“If I had been valued a little more — not much, just a little — maybe it could have ended differently,” Roni Lifshitz, one of the former observers, told NBC News last month. “It’s anger and sadness, mainly frustration, because I was there and no one listened to me.”
Lifshitz, 21, was part of the Israel Defense Forces' unit 414 stationed at the Nahal Oz military base on the Gaza border. Soldiers in the all-women field observers team, most just 19 or 20 years old and fulfilling their mandatory military service, would spend hours glued to feeds from surveillance cameras watching for threats.
In the months leading up to Oct. 7, Lifshitz said she started noticing unusual activity. Truckloads of Hamas militants, which appeared to be special forces units because they were all dressed in black, were driving within 300 yards of the fence, in a “combat patrol,” she said. After they stopped, she said they would carefully scan Israeli positions while talking amongst themselves.
Israeli soldier Roni Lifshitz speaking to NBC News' chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel in Tel Aviv on Sept. 12.NBC NewsOn another occasion she said she saw militants using a “model of an Israeli tank they had built to train to kidnap soldiers. They were actually practicing scenarios that happened on Oct. 7,” she said.
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