Attitudes change as Israeli women fight on the front lines of Gaza war

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

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.

Capt Busi is responsible not just for the lives of her subordinates search-and-rescue engineers whose specialised 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 Capt 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," Capt 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 2023, 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 24,700 Palestinians, many of them women and children, have been killed since the start of the war, according to Gaza health officials.

The integration of women into the military's combat units has been the subject of a lengthy debate in Israel, home to one of the world's few armies that conscript women at 18 for mandatory service.

For years, the question of women serving at the front pitted ultraconservative rabbis and religiously observant soldiers against feminists, secularists and critics of the country's traditionally macho culture.