Ready for duty, Israel’s warrior women
ARMED with a grenade launcher, an Israeli woman soldier checks her weapon then washes her face with just a glance in a hand-held mirror.
The soldier is completing her last day of training before she joins the Lions of Jordan combat battalion, one of three mixedgender units in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) along with Caracal and Cheetah.
She will be deployed to protect Israel’s border with Jordan.
The woman, in her early 20s, learned how to fight near the West Bank village of Bardale on the Palestinian border.
She is holding a 40mm M203 grenade launcher attached to a M4 rifle.
Women were enlisted into the Lions of Jordan from 2014. They serve in field intelligence, air defence and artillery units.
The IDF opened up 92 per cent of its positions to women last year. The 2000 equality amendment to Israeli military service law declares that: ‘The right of women to serve in any role in the IDF is equal to the right of men.’
All Jewish Israeli citizens are required to complete national service at the age of 18 – including girls, who must serve a minimum of two years in the armed forces. Israel has a long history of women fighters – when the state was founded in 1948, women comprised a fifth of its forces. By 2011 this number had grown to a third of all IDF soldiers and half of its officers.
More than 500 women Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat while serving in the country’s military.
In January three women soldiers died when a Palestinian driver intentionally rammed his truck into a group of troops all in their early 20s. The lorry was driven into the fighters on a picture-postcard promenade overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, near a park called the Peace Forest.
In a sickening manoeuvre, the driver then reversed over the casualties before he was shot dead.