Israeli Women Fight on Front Line in Gaza, a First

When Capt. Amit Busi gets a chance to sleep, she does so with her boots on — and in a shared tent in an improvised Israeli military post in northern Gaza.

There she commands a company of 83 soldiers, nearly half of them men. It is one of several mixed-gender units fighting in Gaza, where female combat soldiers and officers are serving on the front line for the first time since the war surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Captain Busi is responsible not just for the lives of her subordinates — search-and-rescue engineers whose specialized training and tools help infantry troops enter damaged and booby-trapped buildings at risk of collapse — but also for the wounded soldiers they help evacuate from the battlefield. She and her soldiers also help scour the area for fighters, weapons and rocket launchers and are responsible for guarding the camp.

It can be easy to forget Captain Busi is only 23, given the respect she has clearly earned from her subordinates — among them Jews, Druze and Bedouin Muslim men.

“The borders have been blurred,” Captain Busi said of the decades-long limits on the roles of female combat troops in Israel. The military, she said, “needs us, so we are here.”

Since Israeli ground forces entered Gaza in late October, women have been there fighting. Their inclusion has helped bolster the image of the army domestically after the intelligence and military failures of Oct. 7, and amid global scrutiny of the campaign’s high civilian death toll. More than 24,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, have been killed since the start of the war, according to Gaza health officials.