During our interview, Lt. N got a notification on her phone. A glance was enough to see that it was another psychological warfare video by the Hamas terror organization. The footage showed hostages Noa Argamani, Yossi Sharabi, and Itay Svirsky, who were kidnapped on Oct. 7. It was later announced that Sharabi and Svirsky were murdered in captivity.
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The phone passes through the room and Sgt. 1st Class R. exclaimed, "Playing mind games with the families of the hostages. These videos are psychological warfare and an attempt to convey a message to the government, but our job is to get some more information out of them, to understand when and where the video was taken. Like with Hanna Katzir, Hamas said she was dead, but she was not."
Four young women in their mid-20s are in charge of intelligence. Due to the classified nature of their work, their full names and photographs are prohibited from publication.
Each finished their military service, but once the war broke out they were called up to new positions: they now were in charge of determining the fate of the missing, whether he or she was alive, killed, or kidnapped.
"When we were called up into reserve duty, we expected to do what we did in our regular service," Sgt. 1st Class H. said. "Only we very quickly realized that we were dealing with hostages and the missing. We didn't know what the role was, it was built and shaped in the process, because this is an event that the state has not yet encountered."
Immediately after the outbreak of the war, when the chaos was in full swing, there was a list of 3,000 people whose fate was unclear. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi tasked Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon to be the hostage envoy.
Making sense of the chaos
Sgt. 1st Class R., 26, had just completed one month of agricultural work in the Golan Heights and was preparing for the start of the school year at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev when she was called up for reserve duty. Sgt. 1st Class H., 26, too, was preparing to study computer science and neuroscience and was looking for a job. Capt. S., 25, was on a trip in Italy, days before she was scheduled to fly to the US to study at Columbia University. Lt. N., 24, was in the US with her family, celebrating completing her military service, and upon return was going to begin studying medicine.
"I was in Los Angeles when the war broke out," Lt. N. says. "They called in the morning and said 'Come to the reserve'. I said 'Fine, but all the flights to Israel were cancelled'. We looked for the first flight, and a few hours after I landed in Israel, I was already on the base."
Sgt. 1st Class R. arrived in Israel after taking three flights. Because she completed her regular military service voluntarily, the military did not draft her into the reserves. But she insisted.
In the headquarters established by Alon, the team first had to deal with a list of names of Israelis with whom contact had been lost.
"There was chaos," Sgt. 1st Class R. recalled. "There were a lot of missing people, some of them alive, but they couldn't be found. We had to make sure those who were alive were removed from the list. In some cases, it took a while to identify those murdered. The main focus was on those abducted – to understand who was taken captive."
At first, the team received a list of names of the missing, and within a few hours, they were asked to report on their findings. Update meetings were held every day, and then back to work.
It began with phone calls to kibbutz members and information that was coming in from all over.
"We wanted to bring some kind of order into the dead/alive/taken hostage question," Sgt. 1st Class R. said.
Only when the scope of the tragedy became clear did the team decide to change their work method by assigning a particular kibbutz to each member of the team. Capt. S. and Sgt. 1st Class R. were in charge of Nir Oz: who was kidnapped, how he or she was kidnapped, by whom, and whether he or she is alive. They used footage from the GoPro cameras used by Hamas terrorists to document the massacre and even remnants collected by volunteers of the ZAKA Search and Rescue organization.
"Nir Oz posed a particular challenge because there was no fighting there against terrorists, except for the security civilian team," Sgt. 1st Class R. said. "Nothing was left behind because the terrorists left before the military arrived. So we used other means: testimonials from friends and WhatsApp correspondence. Anything to piece together what happened."
All four young women understood that in order to complete their task, they would need to not only watch but closely examine, the horrific footage of the massacre. They were asked whether they would be able to cope mentally with the task, and even though each agreed, were given the possibility of stopping and assigned a mental health professional to consult.
"I had never seen a dead body before that," Sgt. 1st Class H., who was put in charge of Kibbutz Kfar Azza, said. "I was the most scared person in the world. I haven't seen any movies that have gunfights, but I understood that this was a mission. You are doing the most important thing in the world and know that there is a family waiting for an answer. At first, it was complex, but we put our feelings aside and tried to look at it the way we look at any other information. One of the reasons why I could handle it is because a part of me still could not grasp or believe that such a terrible thing occurred."
Sgt. 1st Class R. said, "You don't watch the videos just for the sake of watching, because these are things that are difficult to digest. You watch because you need to identify a certain person. I sometimes felt the need to watch, because it's a case I'm working on, part of the story of what happened to the hostage, and there is an advantage to seeing it. So it's true that these are terrible atrocities, but there are also terrorists in the background and you can recognize faces, and get more information about the abduction."
Q: It affects one's soul, doesn't it?
Lt. N.: "Oftentimes I focused on the fact that this was my task, and that gave me a sense of protection. You go there and dive the deepest, and you forget yourself in a way because in the end, that is what needs to be done. We say among ourselves that an outsider would not understand this. And we still feel the crazy dissonance between 'now I'm on the job' and 'now I'm also a human being' and, of course, there are moments of breakdowns and tears.
"We worked continuously, didn't take breaks, and in the second week, I went over material that was particularly difficult for me to watch. It was the first time I said, 'I need air.' And so I stepped outside. It just hit me hard."
The team examined the videos dozens of times to understand what happened because the statement issued had to be precise.
"There was one video in which we couldn't identify the person being kidnapped," Sgt. 1st Class R said. "We identified the area, Nir Oz, but not the man. We put the material aside and said we would return to it when more information arrived. In the end, one of the investigators on the team suspected that it was a specific abduction. As soon as we analyzed the video and understood what time it was taken and knew how to cross-check the time with the hours in which the other members were kidnapped, we gained enough knowledge to understand what had happened."
The story of nine-year-old Emily Hand
Lt. N., who was in charge of Kibbutz Be'eri, remembers the emotional story of Emily Hand, 9, who for a long time was thought to have been killed on Oct. 7, and whose father said, when learning at the time about Emily's death, that it was preferable to being held captive by Hamas.
However, Emily was eventually revealed to have been taken hostage in Gaza and eventually released as part of the November deal.
According to Lt. N., she first broke down when she realized that Emily was in fact alive and had to inform his father.
"This is the first time I remember crying. In that case, we had to work on two aspects at the same time – to prove that she was kidnapped and not dead and that her body was not left in Israel either. When she came back, I cried from excitement."
Kibbutz Be'eri saw many tragedies. Like the long days that passed until the remains of 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni were identified, during which her family already held a funeral for her. She was killed on Oct. 8 in the home of Pessi Cohen, where 14 hostages were held. The home was completely destroyed.
Lt. N. continued, "Mostly we felt that the families got closure. We went through everyone who was killed in that house. I had the chance to talk to those who survived and go as deep as possible in order to give the families a definitive answer. I am convinced that without thorough work, we would not have been able to determine what had happened. It was almost a miracle to bring such accurate information about the destruction and have proof that someone was killed."
Most of the announcements regarding Israelis that were murdered or taken hostage that followed the Oct. 7 onslaught were based on the hard work of the four young women.
Sgt. 1st Class H. "As soon as the ground operation began, a lot of physical materials that had been collected from the Gaza Strip arrived. And the terrorists themselves. We went through everything. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. In some cases, we knew who was taken hostage, but would only learn of their death weeks later."
Q: How did it feel finding out that a hostage was killed?
Sgt. 1st Class H.: "From the moment you realize that the person is probably dead until you manage to prove it with certainty – you feel the need for the story to come to a conclusion as quickly as possible. And when you provide the information that makes it possible to determine, there is a sense of relief that now the family also knows and not just you."
Lt. N.: "On the one hand, you feel a sense of relief and even success in the mission, but I felt at the end of every death announcement a kind of personal grief, certainly when you already know so much about the hostage. When we know for sure that someone is dead and it is announced, we change the person's status on our database. Although we don't hold a ceremony, the team honors the killed as we get together when the status is changed."
The death of a hostage is determined by a committee of experts from the Health Ministry, Institute of Forensic Medicine and approved by the chief rabbi of Israel.
Sgt. 1st Class H.: "We are not authorized to determine, but rather gather information that can testify to a hostage's death. Some cases have been approved by the committee, while others have not. There were also times when we had to deal with very difficult things. We had to dive and delve deeper into visual information we hadn't seen before and situations we didn't know that a dead body could reach."
Sgt. 1st Class R.: "There are times when you understand that the person is probably dead, but it is not brought to the committee if there is even the slightest doubt. Only after every possible scenario has been examined and every extra test done, to rule out a mistake, does it happen."
When necessary, the team even traveled physically to the site of the massacre. A few weeks after the outbreak of the war, they toured the kibbutzim with a military entourage and saw with their eyes the sites that they had seen on video.
"I didn't expect it, but there was so much value to the tour," Capt. S. said. "The fighters walked with us on the paths, entered the homes, remembered and shared things, showed pictures they took – and that helped with conclusions."
Sgt. 1st Class R.: "We took the opportunity and went to the houses of the people we were investigating. I was in a certain house for 50 minutes, trying to analyze the scene, whether the shot from the window came from the inside or the outside, and whether there were traces of blood. We collected samples together with people trained for this to cross-reference information. I felt like I was in a CSI episode."
And what began as chaos has turned into an archive with organized and detailed information about each hostage.
Some hostages return
November was an emotional month as several of the names on the system, Israelis held hostage in Gaza, were released as part of the exchange deal with Hamas.
"On the one hand, it was incredible. On the other, you knew some hostages would receive tragic news. For instance, a wife returned and we needed to inform her that her husband had been killed," Capt. S. said. "Sgt. 1st Class R. and I really wanted to visit the hostages on the first day in the hospital, but we understood that although we knew them well, they did not know us."
Sgt. 1st Class H.: "It was a strange feeling. People who are names and images on the computer, that we know everything about, suddenly get off the bus and they are real. Every time I see Agam Goldstein-Almog, [17], being interviewed – I feel I know her. She is a part of me. It's crazy."
For Lt. N., the return of Yarden Roman-Gat, [35], was particularly exciting. During the period of captivity, she met with Alon, Roman-Gat's husband, who asked to tell her about what happened on Oct. 7.
"While we were talking, 3-year-old Gefen arrived, their daughter. I heard from Alon that he told her that mom got lost and they are looking for her, and you can't help but be affected. For me, there was no way that the girl wouldn't get her mom back, and when Yarden returned, I bawled. I didn't get to meet them, and I have a dream to meet some of the freed hostages, but there is also something right about being the most involved and on the other hand, doing the work separately."
Sgt. 1st Class R.: "The emotional connection is inevitable. Many times I ask if the connection contributes to or harms my work. In the end, the task is to do the research in order to help, and I have to be the best. If the connection gives motivation and strength – it's good, but if it doesn't – one needs to find a balance."
Capt. S.: "I developed a good relationship with the brother of one of the hostages, and at some point, he wanted to know what we knew about his sibling and I couldn't share. So there was a moment when I called him and burst into tears that I'm sorry I can't tell. It's heartbreaking to know that he wants to do everything for his brother and you prevent him from knowing more.
"I only cried at times when I felt we left the families who were waiting for a final answer down. That we failed to give them enough. You see intelligence material in front of your eyes and cannot say with a hundred percent certainty that it is the specific hostage. This is the most frustrating feeling because there is a family waiting for an answer."
Capt. S. has met with several released hostages. She came to offer her condolences to the family of Ronen Engel, who was kidnapped from Nir Oz on Oct. 7, and killed in Hamas captivity, and met Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, who was among the first to be released from Hamas captivity.
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"We told them in general what it is we do, but without going into the details. I remember there was a conversation about Engel and his tattoos and we kept quiet, but after our research, we knew exactly."
When asked what they thought about the continuation of the war – whether defeating Hamas or freeing the hostages was of first priority, the young women said they were glad they weren't the ones who needed to decide.
Sgt. 1st Class R. said, "I feel that the hostages are my main experience of the war. That's it. I have no idea what happens in combat. Yesterday I sat with a friend, who is in the reserves, and our language is completely different. We both deal with war but on different issues. But I can surely understand the unimaginable experience of being held hostage for over 100 days."
