For the first time, Israeli women are fighting on the front lines in the Gaza Strip

GAZA STRIP – When Captain Amit Busi has the opportunity to sleep, he does so with his boots on and in a shared tent at a makeshift Israeli military outpost in the northern Gaza Strip.

There he leads a company of 83 soldiers, almost half of them men.

It’s one of many mixed units fighting in Gaza, where women soldiers and combat officers are serving on the front lines for the first time since the war that surrounded the creation of Israel in 1948.

Responsibility

Busi is responsible not only for the lives of his subordinates – search and rescue engineers whose specialized training and tools help infantry troops enter damaged and booby-trapped buildings in danger of collapsing – but also for the wounded soldiers they help evacuate from the battlefield.

She and her soldiers also help search the area for fighters, weapons and rocket launchers and guard the camp.

It’s easy to forget that Busi He is only 23 years oldgiven the respect he earned from his subordinates, including Jews, Druze and Bedouin Muslims.

“The lines have become blurred,” Busi says, referring to the limits imposed for decades on the role of women in Israel’s combat troops.

The army, he said, “needs us, that’s why we’re here.”

Since Israeli ground forces entered Gaza in late October, women have been there fighting.

Its inclusion helped boost the army’s image in the country following the military and intelligence failures of October 7 and in the context of global scrutiny over the campaign’s high number of civilian casualties.

According to Gaza health officials, more than 23,000 Palestinians have died since the war began, many of them women and children.

The integration of women into army combat units has been the subject of a long debate in Israel, where there is one of the few armies in the world that recruits women at the age of 18 for compulsory service.

For years, the issue of women serving on the front lines has pitted ultra-conservative rabbis and religiously observant soldiers against feminists, secularists and critics of the country’s traditionally sexist culture.

Now the debate is over.

Lieutenant General Herzi Haleviarmy chief of staff, said there was no point in continuing discussions after female soldiers rushed to confront Hamas attackers on October 7, because their “action and struggle” speak louder than words.

Like other fundamental aspects of Israeli life, many preconceptions about women in combat were overturned on October 7, when hundreds of Hamas-led gunmen crossed the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people, mostly of which civilians, according to the Israeli authorities. and kidnapping 240 hostages to take them to Gaza.

In the months that followed, the demands of the military brought about social changes at breakneck speed.

The same-sex partners of the murdered soldiers are now legally recognized widows and widowers, and at least one transsexual soldierHe fought on the Gaza front.

Despite years of ridicule from conservative sectors of Israeli society, women soldiers have become symbols of progress and equality, appearing on magazine covers and on television news.

A recent survey conducted by the Israel Institute for Democracy revealed that among the secular public, approximately 70% of women and 67% of men support increase the number of women in combat roles.

In recent years, women have made up about 18 percent of the military’s combat forces.

“Everyone uses the phrase, ‘The debate is over,’” said Idit Shafran Gittleman, director of the Military and Society program at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

“Everyone saw what happened on October 7,” she said, adding that “women contribute to security, not diminish it.”

The Israeli women entered combat almost immediately on October 7.

Two all-female tank crews, once the butt of sexist jokes, charged across the desert that morning to repel waves of armed infiltrators from Gaza.

The commander of the Caracal, a mixed infantry battalion, led a 12-hour battle along the Gaza border with two companies equipped with Lau missiles and machine guns.

Together with the tanks, they helped block the Hamas advance, saving several communities from attacks.

“We stopped them, they didn’t pass us,” said the commander, Lt. Col. Or Ben Yehuda, 34, a career officer and mother of three, speaking at the battalion’s desert base near the Egyptian border, where your the unit usually deploys.

Command

Israel had a female prime minister, Golda Meirfrom 1969 to 1974.

The recently retired Chief Justice of Israel, Esther Hayuthe has been one of the country’s most influential public officials and has recently dealt a major blow to the Prime Minister’s government efforts Benjamin Netanyahu for the limitation of the powers of the judiciary.

Despite these achievements, the war came at a difficult time for female representation in the government, which is the most far-right government in the country’s history.

The War Cabinet, assembled after October 7, includes two former chiefs of staff and a general, but no women.

When military women raised the alarm before October 7 that they had detected unusual activity along the Gaza border, which they considered consistent with planning for a major terrorist attack, they say they were rejected by their senior male officers, who suggested they were the eyes, not the brains, of the military.

THE ultra-conservative rabbis They denigrated women’s service in general and lashed out at Orthodox women in particular, who give up religious exemptions to serve.

And some conservative activists have discredited the success of female soldiers, saying women are asked less and are a hindrance to the military.

Decades of petitions and Supreme Court rulings have challenged senior military leaders to balance operational needs with principles of equal rights and opportunity.

The army has progressively opened 90% of its functions to women, but they remain excluded front line combat positions in major infantry units and some elite commando units that traditionally operate behind enemy lines in times of war.

Although some women serve in mixed-gender units, tank crews remain segregated by sex.

This policy was intended to take into account the religious sensitivity aroused by the fact that men and women remain together for days in a tank.

However, women on the front lines say attitudes are changing.

“It’s a process,” said Capt. Pnina Shechtman, platoon commander of the Bardelas mixed battalion, regularly deployed along Israel’s southern border with Jordan.

Shechtman spoke by phone after a day of operations inside Gaza.

“It’s a battlefield,” he said.

“You see, hear and smell a lot. All the senses are very heightened. I have to be concentrated; I have soldiers at my command. There is no time for feelings.”

He said he sent religiously observant soldiers and that it was all about mutual respect.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “we have the same mission.”

At dusk on a recent weekday, a journalist and a photographer from The New York Times They entered northern Gaza with Busi and his companions, kicking up clouds of dust in a dark, desolate land lit only by a nearly full moon.

Buildings along the route parallel to the Mediterranean coast were crushed into layers of concrete.

We didn’t see anyone, just a few dogs, until we stopped at a small, dimly lit military outpost made up of tents and shipping containers, surrounded by sandbanks.

Coverage

Escorted by Busi we were free to explore the position, but not to go further.

The Times accepted a military transport to provide rare access to wartime Gaza, which is usually closed to journalists.

The Times did not allow the Israeli military to review its coverage before publishing it.

Busi, who wears her hair in a long braid, supports up to a third of her body weight simply by walking around the base, between her ceramic flak jacket, her M4 assault rifle and other equipment.

Like everyone in the unit, he feeds mainly on rations of canned food, dried sausages and energy bars, and showers in a container about once biweekly.

The first packages delivered to the camp contained oversized T-shirts, boxer shorts and tzitzit, the ritual underwear worn by Orthodox Jewish men.

They now get toiletries for women.

At the Gaza base, rockets lit up the sky. No one backed away from the occasional boom.

Some of the male soldiers around said they slept well knowing that Busi and his troops were guarding the base.

One of them said he felt even safer with the women warriors because they had to prove themselves, not because they were women, but because it was their first time in Gaza.

The war claimed the lives of some 200 Israeli soldiers and thousands of Palestinians, most of them civilians.

Busi said the army was “doing everything possible” to try to avoid civilian casualties and lamented the destruction of so many homes.

But it was Hamas, he said, that turned Gaza into a war zone.

The front line in Gaza is never more than a few hours’ drive from soldiers’ homes, a testament to how close the war is.

Busi said he will stay in Gaza as long as necessary.

“I really hope that the fact that we’re here,” she said, “means that in 20 years my kids won’t have to be here anymore.”

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