“Like a bad dream”: Israeli soldiers concentrated in nervous anticipation near the Gaza border

A double line of Israeli tanks stretched to the horizon, says The Guardian. About 100 low-lying buildings are visible, quickly taking on the color of the pervasive desert dust. This is just a small portion of the concentrated Israeli military power stationed along Gaza’s borders, awaiting orders to move. Israel has around 2,200 tanks, a massive force 10 times larger than the British Army’s tank fleet, and many of them are here, fueled and ready for battle.

About 30 km to the north, near the border town of Sderot, huge self-propelled guns were dug into the ground, pointed towards Beit Hanoun and Gaza City, which lie just over the crest of the hill. Trucks and tankers carrying fuel and water move in convoys along Israeli roads that run north-south, parallel to the Gaza border, while reservists fill the streets, cafes and gas stations of border towns that bore the brunt of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that sparked the current war.

After this attack, more than 350 thousand reservists returned to duty. Their cars fill parking lots at major bases in southern Israel, and overcrowded vehicles were left haphazardly on the side of the road as the country’s youth rushed to answer the call.

Anat and Nurit (not their real names), The Guardian says, were far away at the time of the attack: Anat was in Bali – on a trip that she hoped would help her decide what to do with her life. Nurit was in Perth (Australia) visiting friends and relatives. They watched the news on television and quickly realized that this was not normal, one of the periodic periods of fighting they had experienced while serving in the army six years ago.

“At first I thought I would just stay in Australia, but then it became clear that there was no way for me,” Nurit said. Both girls are in their 20s and have friends who were at the Supernova music festival, where 260 young people were shot and killed. Some survived. The body of another person was found recently.

“For us this is real and urgent. These were people we knew,” Anat said. Her mother is from Bolton and became Israeli after she came to work on a kibbutz and married a local man. Anat returned from Bali last week on a plane specially sent to gather the young Israeli diaspora, which flew back full of reservists.

Anat and Nurit are now in military uniform having lunch in a cafe at a gas station, with their machine guns on their knees, The Guardian continues. They serve in a military intelligence unit, and under their uniforms they are still wearing the summer clothes they packed for vacation.

“I still wake up and feel a new shock that all this happened. It’s like a terrible dream, and then every morning I remember that this is real,” says Nurit.

The girls said their mood fluctuated wildly from despair to the feeling that something positive would come out of this war, and back to despair. At the next table, another young Israeli woman in military uniform, about the same age, was crying, holding her head in her hands, tears dripping through her fingers.

The soldiers here have no idea when the order to attack will come.

“It’s a roller coaster,” Anat said. “Sometimes everything is tense and we are on guard, and then we relax again.”

In Tel Aviv, Israeli military leaders are reported to be arguing with their civilian “masters” in Benjamin Netanyahu’s office over when the army should be deployed. Having concentrated their forces, the generals are breaking the leash to use them in a state of maximum readiness. The government, however, is concerned that a ground invasion of Gaza would provoke a Hezbollah attack across the northern border with Lebanon.

At the moment, the Israeli military shares the roads here with civilians, says The Guardian. Farmers were harvesting cotton, and a yellow spray plane could be seen making wide arcs over the fields several miles away from the long column of tanks.

Rocket attacks from Gaza continue to occur daily in the area, but are becoming less frequent every day. The Israeli military said it intercepted a Hamas drone heading for Ein Habesor. The brunt of the war is being felt on the other side of the border, in Khan Younis, Rafah and Gaza City, which are under constant bombardment. Israeli special forces also carried out a raid to pave the way for the expected mass attack and to gather intelligence on more than 200 hostages taken by militants on October 7, it was announced Monday.

Reminders of the October 7 attack are visible everywhere. The Supernova festival was a short drive from where Anat and Nurit were having lunch. At an intersection south of Sderot, the wreckage of a white Toyota was left on the side of the road, its windows broken and its side badly riddled with bullet holes. Inside, the remains of extinguished lives were still visible: scraps of clothing and a child’s seat. The car belonged to a Bedouin family that was ambushed by Hamas militants that morning.

They managed to run to a nearby concrete bomb shelter (every bus stop in this part of the country has one), but the attackers followed them there and threw a grenade inside, killing them all…