Still, the presence of women in combat remains relatively rare, even in Israel: In 2011 only 3 percent of combat officers were women. Yoav Gelber, a professor of Israeli military history at Haifa University, says that many Israelis still see female combat as a rarity. "It's an exception ... most peo
Intelligence-community historian Yoav Gelber has found that at the end of the 1948 war, Israel had already established in Tehran "Base 1" of the "special roles officers" unit, which eventually became Military Intelligence Unit 504.