Was Roni Eshel afraid when she sat in front of her surveillance monitors, at 4 am on October 7, 2023? Afraid of being on the front lines, as she sat just 850 meters from the Gaza Strip, in barracks that had been left half empty, as it was the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah? Eyal Eshel, her father, will never know. That morning, at around 6:30 am, terrorists from the Palestinian enclave launched an assault on the Israeli military base of Nahal Oz, as well as the kibbutz of the same name. On foot, in pickup trucks or on motorcycles, 215 men surged forward, in three successive waves, against the base and its sleeping soldiers, where the battle quickly turned into a massacre.

Fifty-three of the 162 soldiers present, many of them young women performing their military service, were murdered within a few hours. Most were caught by surprise and were still in their pajamas. Ten other soldiers were among the hostages taken to Gaza, where two tank operators are still held in captivity. As for Roni, the 19-year-old lookout, she was burned alive in her command post, together with several of her squadmates and a few non-commissioned officers, including a Bedouin scout who had stayed behind to defend the women soldiers to the bitter end.

This tragedy, which became one of the most glaring symptoms of the Israeli army's weaknesses, highlighted several incidents of negligence, each one nested within the next. The first, of course, was the high command's willful blindness, as it had been convinced that Hamas would never have the operational capacity to conduct a large-scale operation – even after it had discovered an attack plan devised by the Islamist movement, under the codename "Jericho Wall," which, point by point, detailed the impending catastrophe.

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