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 is one of several
mixed units
fighting in Gaza, where female combat soldiers and officers are serving on the front lines for the first time since the war surrounding Israel's creation in 1948.
Responsibility
Busi is responsible not only for the lives of his subordinates - search and rescue engineers whose training and specialized tools help infantry troops enter damaged and booby-trapped buildings in danger of collapsing - but also for the wounded soldiers who help to evacuate from the battlefield.
She and her soldiers also help search the area for fighters, weapons, and rocket launchers, and keep watch over the camp.
It's easy to forget that Busi
is only 23 years old
, given the respect he has earned from his subordinates, who include Jews, Druze and Bedouin Muslims.
"The lines have been blurred," says Busi, referring to the limits imposed for decades on the roles of female combat troops in Israel.
The military, 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 has helped bolster the army's image in the country following the military and intelligence failures of October 7, and amid global scrutiny over the high number of civilian victims of the campaign.
More than 23,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, have died since the start of the war, according to Gaza health officials.
The integration of women into army combat units has been the subject of
long debate
in Israel, which is home to one of the few armies in the world that recruits women at age 18 for mandatory service.
For years, the issue of women serving on the front lines has pitted ultraconservative rabbis and religiously observant soldiers against feminists, secularists and critics of the country's traditionally sexist culture.
Now, that debate is over.
Lieutenant General
Herzi Halevi
, Chief of the Army General Staff, declared that there is no point in further arguing after female soldiers rushed to confront Hamas attackers on October 7, because their "action and fight" speak louder than words.
Like other fundamental aspects of Israeli life, many preconceptions about women in combat were upended on October 7, when hundreds of gunmen led by Hamas crossed the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities, and kidnapping
240 hostages
to take them to Gaza.
In the months since, the needs of the military have driven social changes at breakneck speed.
Same-sex partners of murdered soldiers are now legally recognized widows and widowers, and at least one
transgender soldier
has fought on the Gaza front.
Despite years of ridicule from conservative sectors of Israeli society, female combat soldiers have become
symbols of progress and equality,
appearing on magazine covers and on television news reports.
A recent poll by the Israel Institute for Democracy found that among the lay public, about 70% of women and 67% of men favored increasing
the
number of women in combat roles.
In recent years, women have made up about 18% of the military's combat forces.
"Everyone is using 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, they don't diminish it."
Israeli women entered combat almost immediately on October 7.
Two all-female tank crews, once the subject of sexist jokes, launched across the desert that morning to help repel waves of armed infiltrators from Gaza.
The commander of 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 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 base in the desert near the Egyptian border, where your unit usually deploys.
Leadership
Israel had one female prime minister,
Golda Meir
, from 1969 to 1974.
Israel's recently retired Chief Justice
Esther Hayut was one of the country's most influential officials, recently dealing a major blow to Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
's government's efforts
to trim the powers of the judiciary.
Despite these achievements, the war has come at a low moment for female representation in the government, which is the most far-right 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 a major terrorist attack, they say they
were dismissed
by their superior officers male, who suggested they were the eyes, not the brains, of the military.
Ultraconservative rabbis
have
disparaged women's service in general and lashed out at Orthodox women, in particular, who give up religious exemptions in order to serve.
And some conservative activists have discredited the success of female soldiers, saying that women are asked less and are a liability 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 military has gradually opened up 90% of its roles to women, but they remain excluded from
frontline combat positions
in major infantry units and some of the elite commando units that traditionally operate through enemy lines in time of war.
Although some women serve in mixed units, tank crews remain segregated by sex.
This policy was intended to take into account the religious sensitivities raised 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, a platoon commander in a mixed battalion, Bardelas, routinely 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 focused; I have soldiers at my command. There is no time for feelings."
He said he had sent religiously observant soldiers and that it was all a matter of mutual respect.
"At the end of the day," he said, "we have the same mission."
At dusk on a recent weekday, a
New York Times
reporter and photographer headed into northern Gaza with Busi and his comrades, kicking up clouds of dust in a dark wasteland illuminated only by a nearly full moon.
Buildings along the route parallel to the Mediterranean coast were crushed in layers of concrete.
We saw no people, just a few dogs, until we stopped at a small, barely lit military outpost of tents and containers surrounded by sand berms.
Coverage
Escorted by Busi, we were free to explore the post, but not to go further.
The Times accepted a military transport to ensure rare wartime access to 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 just walking around the base, between her ceramic bulletproof vest, her M4 assault rifle and other equipment.
Like everyone in the unit, he feeds primarily on rations of canned food, dried sausages and energy bars, and showers in a container about
once
every two weeks.
The first care packages delivered to the camp contained oversized T-shirts, boxer shorts and tzitzit, the ritual underwear worn by Orthodox Jewish men.
They now receive toiletries for women.
At the Gaza base, flares illuminated the sky.
No one flinched at the occasional boom.
Some of the male soldiers milling 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 female warriors because they had to prove themselves, not because they were women, but because it was their first time in Gaza.
The war has claimed the lives of some
200 Israeli soldiers
and thousands of Palestinians, most of them civilians.
Busi said the army "does 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 reminder of how close the war is.
Busi stated that he would stay in Gaza as long as necessary.
"I really hope that the fact that we're here," he said, "means that in 20 years my kids won't have to be."
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