NAHAL OZ BASE, Israel—It was about 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7 when dozens of heavily armed men burst into view on Maya Desiatnik’s video screen. The Israeli soldier, charged with monitoring a stretch of the Gaza frontier, picked up the radio at her side and raised the alarm.
“There is a Turkish knight!” she said, using the Israeli military code word for an incursion into Israeli territory. Palestinian militants were breaching the border.
For months, Desiatnik, now 20 years old, and her colleagues in the observer unit, all of them young women, had warned their superiors repeatedly—and with increasing vehemence—that the Islamist militant group Hamas seemed to be preparing a major attack. Their concerns were dismissed.
