From: BBC January 15, 2024
They were Israel's 'eyes on the border' - but their Hamas warnings went unheard

They are known as Israel's eyes on the Gaza border.
For years, units of young female conscripts had one job here. It was to sit in surveillance bases for hours, looking for signs of anything suspicious.

In the months leading up to the 7 October attacks by Hamas, they did begin to see things:
practice raids, mock hostage-taking, and farmers behaving strangely on the other side of the fence.

It was clear to some of these women that Hamas was planning something big - that there was, "balloon that was going to burst".

"The problem is that they [the military] didn't connect the dots," a former commander at one of the border units tells the BBC.
If they had, she says, they would have realised that Hamas was preparing something unprecedented.

According to a report in The New York Times a lengthy blueprint detailing Hamas's plans had been in the hands of Israeli officials for more than a year before 7 October, but was dismissed as aspirational.

A veteran analyst in Israel's intelligence agency Unit 8200 warned three months before the attacks that Hamas had conducted an intense training exercise that appeared similar to that outlined in the blueprint, but her concerns were brushed off, the newspaper reports.

The drills conducted by Hamas and other armed groups had also been posted publicly on social media, as seen in this BBC investigation.