Edna Mor adjusted her computer camera, angling it toward the grand piano at the heart of her living room. Her thick Russian accent grew harder to understand as she fought back tears.

“This is the holiest place in my house,” she whispered. “She loved playing so much.”

“She” is Shirel Mor, Edna’s daughter, who was one of the tatzpitaniyot, observer soldiers from the Border Defense Corps’ 414th unit, tasked with keeping close watch on the border with Gaza. She and 15 other young female soldiers from her unit were murdered at the Nahal Oz base in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. 

Though her daughter has long been buried, Edna still hasn’t accepted it—she’s always waiting for her to come home. 

Mor described Shirel as wise beyond her years, a child who never argued with anyone and always pursued justice. She said her daughter taught her how to compartmentalize and focus on what truly mattered. When her mother invited friends over, Shirel would sit quietly, listening as they chatted in the living room. Then, once they left, she would shake her head.

“ ‘Why do they waste their time with gossip?’” Mor recalled her daughter saying. “ ‘Life is too short. Life goes too fast.’ ”

In the end, it was Shirel’s life that was over too quickly.

Since that day in 2023, Shirel’s family has been shattered. Her 25-year-old brother, Matanel, has shut down. He suffers from depression, can no longer work and has become reliant on sleeping pills, his mother said. Eventually, he started seeing a psychologist.

“She would call him even more than she would call me or my husband,” Mor said of her children’s close relationship. “They went everywhere together. He is in terrible pain. He is lost. We are lost. We must find a way to continue, but we don’t know how.”

Three other siblings—Ilana, Shalom and Michaela—are struggling as well.

Mor is not just grieving—she’s also angry. Her fury has grown as reports from the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet reveal a series of security failures leading up to October 7. And even those reports, she insists, barely scratch the surface of what happened.

Her pain was also sharpened by the return of some of her daughter’s fellow soldiers from Hamas captivity in late January. The five tatzpitaniyot kidnapped and held in Gaza—Daniella Gilboa, Karina Ariev, Naama Levy, Agam Berger and Liri Albag—were released in a hostage deal that marked a time of joy for their families and the nation, and a brutal reminder that Mor’s daughter will never come home.

Weeks after the young women’s release, the IDF issued a detailed report on the October 7 attack on Nahal Oz, one of several army reports on attack sites made public. Separately, the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, has released its own review and has begun to take responsibility for its failures.

Led by Col. Ido Kas, the IDF investigation into Nahal Oz found that 215 Hamas terrorists had stormed the base, where 162 soldiers were stationed that day. Security protocols did not account for such an attack, and no drills had simulated facing a ground assault. The base’s perimeter wall had gaps, and its shelters and war room were built to withstand rocket fire, not a full-scale ground invasion. 

The report also revealed that Hamas had been gathering intelligence for years using drones, soldiers’ social media accounts and IDF publications. Indeed, during the subsequent fighting in Gaza, the IDF recovered a 2023 Hamas document that detailed the Nahal Oz base with precision.

At 7:05 a.m. on that Saturday, terrorists breached the base and attacked a shelter, abducting seven surveillance soldiers. One of them, Ori Megidish, was rescued on October 29, 2023, in a joint IDF and Shin Bet operation just two days after Israel launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza. Another, Cpl. Noa Marciano, was killed in Gaza. Her body was found by the IDF in a building next to the Al-Shifa Hospital in November 2023.

The remaining five were held for more than 470 days.

By noon on October 7, Hamas had set fire to the Nahal Oz command center, killing the surveillance soldiers trapped inside. In total, 53 soldiers were killed on the base—31 combat troops and 22 noncombat personnel. Ten were taken hostage. The IDF killed 45 terrorists in and around the base.

The release of this report—along with others on various communities attacked that day—was meant to restore public trust in the IDF’s ability to assess its failures. Instead, it has had the opposite effect.

A Maariv survey released in March found that nearly half of Israelis—47 percent—claimed declining trust in the IDF following the public release of the findings.

The report “tells me what happened at 6:30 a.m. after the rockets started,” Mor said. “I want to know what happened to my daughter’s warning. The negligence of October 7 didn’t start that night—it started months, maybe even years before.”

Shirel had always reassured her mother that everything was fine. But when she came home for Sukkot break just days before the massacre on Simchat Torah, Mor recalled that she was different, nervous. She told one of her friends she was afraid to go back to her base stationed less than a mile from the Gaza border.

“They knew this was going to happen—that Hamas would break through the fence,” Mor said.

Another grieving parent of an observer soldier agreed. “The reports highlighted the army’s incompetence and showed that even more needs to be investigated to ensure October 7 never happens again,” said Eyal Eshel, father of Roni Eshel, who, like Shirel, was burned alive in the Nahal Oz command center.

Mor and Eshel are among the many Israelis who are insisting that the government conduct a full national inquiry and hold those responsible in the government, the military and the intelligence accountable.

If not, Mor said, “I don’t see a future for this country.”

Gabi Siboni, an IDF reserve colonel and a researcher at the Misgav Institute for National Security, called the failure “multidimensional.” Israel “had all the intelligence before October 7 but misread it entirely,” he said.

Brig. Gen. (Res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said he had warned of such an all-out attack months before October 7. In June 2023, he wrote a report for the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank, criticizing Israel’s previous strategy, dubbed “mowing the grass.” It relied on large-scale military operations aimed at buying time and restoring short-term calm rather than trying to eliminate Hamas. But once Hamas regained strength, another round of fighting became inevitable. It became a recurring cycle—like a homeowner who must keep mowing the lawn to prevent it from becoming overgrown.

“The security community dismissed my paper,” Kuperwasser said in an interview. 

Shira Efron, research director at the Israel Policy Forum, noted that even as Hamas leaders spoke openly about attacking the country, Israel responded by granting them more work permits and facilitating Qatari financial support. For years, Qatar had been sending millions of dollars each month into the Gaza Strip.

The funds were approved by Israeli authorities who presumed the cash flow would keep the terror organization contained, but ultimately the money helped strengthen Hamas’s ability to confront Israel.

Efron argued that these initial investigations provide only a fragmented view of what went wrong, with each military branch examining its own failures in isolation. What Israel needs, she said, is a comprehensive inquiry covering not just the IDF, but also intelligence agencies and political decision-makers.

Siboni agreed. “We need to get to the root of the truth,” he said. “Without it, we’ll never fix this.”

On January 25, four of the five kidnapped tatzpitaniyot were released—Hamas freed Berger five days later—bringing a measure of closure to their families as the young women began their long journeys toward recovery. Slowly, frightening details of their captivity have emerged alongside remarkable stories of resilience.

Albag found a way to manipulate her captors. The women were allowed to use the bathroom only twice a day, and she discovered that if she timed her trip just right, she could glimpse the sunset through a crack in the door.

Berger prayed a lot in Gaza. A source close to her confirmed that she discovered a siddur buried in the dirt near where she was held and persuaded her captors to let her keep it.

Gilboa taught herself to sing “Shalom Aleichem” in Arabic so she could keep the tradition alive on Shabbat. 

The country celebrated their return with overwhelming joy. Efron, of the Israel Policy Forum, said she still gets goosebumps when she remembers the moment of their release.

“There were tons of rumors about what they had gone through—that they would return pregnant or with babies. I am sure we don’t know even a fraction of the horrors they endured, but seeing them standing on that stage, looking relatively healthy, smiling proudly in the face of Hamas—they looked like superheroes,” Efron said. “They are only kids, but they are superheroes.”

Before they were turned over to the Red Cross, Hamas forced each of the soldiers to stand on a stage before thousands of armed fighters. The women were likely terrified, but they smiled—determined to project strength and dignity in the face of their ordeal.

But for parents like Mor and Eshel, their homecoming was bittersweet.

“It was tough for me,” Mor said. “I kept asking myself, ‘Why couldn’t my daughter have been kidnapped? At least then she would have come back to me.’ I’m happy for them but also angry and in pain. My daughter is not coming back.”

Eshel echoed her grief. “I really wanted them to come home,” he said of the five soldiers. But, the grieving father added, “I am filled with jealousy just knowing their parents can hug their daughters, and I cannot. This whole thing could have been prevented, and Roni could still be here.”

Another mother, Anat Glass, whose daughter, Yam, was also burned alive in the command center at Nahal Oz, voiced the same despair.

“I’m still waiting for my daughter to come home,” she said in an interview. “I still cannot believe I won’t speak to her again.”

Before October 7, Glass said, her family was “normal”—two parents, three children. Nearly a decade ago, her husband, Lior, had been relocated for his job to the Netherlands, and they lived there for about five years. In 2021, they returned to Israel so that Yam and her older brother could serve in the IDF.

The weekend before the tragedy, Yam was home with her mother while her father and brothers went on a trip to Greece. The two spoke about how happy Yam was. They even planned to take a girls’ trip after Yam finished her army service.

Days later, when the attacks began, Glass tried desperately to reach her daughter. But the phone call never went through.

For four weeks, the IDF couldn’t confirm whether Yam had been kidnapped, escaped or murdered. Her family searched every hospital and posted across social media, hoping for any sign of her. They waited, day after day, not knowing her fate.

About a month later, the knock on the door came. The army delivered the tragic news: Yam’s remains had been identified by DNA.

“We don’t know what we buried,” Glass said. Her daughter had been burned beyond recognition.

Receiving the Nahal Oz report only deepened her heartbreak, she said. It was “so upsetting—she could have been saved. These girls tried to call for help.”

Only two tatzpitaniyot survived the attack without being killed or kidnapped. Yael Rotenberg, who was asleep in the living quarters when the assault began, miraculously lived. Maya Desiatnik managed to escape through a small bathroom window in the command center as it went up in flames.

Desiatnik described feeling “relief” and “happiness” when the five tatzpitaniyot were freed. She has visited two of them and hopes to reconnect with the others, but it remains challenging.

“Sometimes I ask myself, ‘What if it had been me?’ ” she admitted, adding that she suffers from severe survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder.

She remembers October 7 with haunting clarity: “When the terrorists set the command room on fire, the smoke spread quickly. It was everywhere. Despite the darkness, I managed to talk myself through it to calm myself down. I told myself I had to get out, no matter what.

“I climbed through the window and made my way around the building to where there were cement blocks. I hid there,” she continued. “We had to stay hidden for almost three hours.”

Desiatnik escaped alongside two noncombat soldiers from the Golani unit. Since then, she has visited the Nahal Oz base twice hoping for closure, but each visit has left her unsettled.

“It doesn’t look like my base,” she said. “My base was colorful and full of girls. We walked around; we laughed. Now, it’s all gone.”

In the aftermath, she has found comfort in a support group of fellow soldiers from across the country who survived that day. But she, too, remains angry.

“It’s infuriating that we were the ones who reported what was happening—and we were the ones who got killed,” Desiatnik said. “Everyone involved owes an explanation for what went wrong so that the country can learn from it.”

Kuperwasser, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, acknowledged that no actions could make up for the loss the families of the observer soldiers have experienced, but action is needed.

“We cannot undo the suffering of those who lost the dearest thing they had,” he said. “What we can do is ensure we don’t repeat the same mistakes. We must investigate, learn and dramatically improve our response. That is the only way to honor these 16 fallen observers. It won’t compensate their families, but it might offer them a small measure of solace.”

For Mor, a national inquiry that leads to change is imperative. “I cannot close the circle,” she said, her voice breaking. “Not until I know the state has changed—until I know my daughter didn’t die in vain.” 

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Maayan Hoffman is executive editor of ILTV News, a correspondent for The Media Line and a columnist for Ynet News.