ON THE ISRAELI-EGYPTIAN BORDER -- Sergeant Tzipora Schindler , a 2004 graduate of Newton South High School, is on the front lines of Israel's other border war, on the lookout for terrorists and smugglers along the country's southern frontier.

From her base camp atop Mount Uzia, she can see through binoculars where Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia intersect at the Gulf of Aqaba below, gleaming like an oasis in the desert landscape.

Schindler, 20, left her parents in Newton and moved to Israel two years ago, seeking spiritual rebirth after spending part of her childhood in Jerusalem. She quickly volunteered for the only infantry battalion in the Israel Defense Forces that includes women.

Now, while much of the world focuses on Israel's tense northern border with Lebanon, Schindler and her comrades in the Karkal, or ``Lynx," battalion -- about 70 percent of whom are female -- are attempting to choke off a sophisticated criminal and terrorist smuggling network that poses a growing threat to the Jewish state.

They are on the hunt not only for Palestinian terrorists from the Gaza Strip and other Islamic militants. The soldiers are also seeking to capture thousands of would-be illegal workers and a growing number of women from such countries as Turkey, Georgia, Russia, China, Sudan, and Colombia who are being smuggled into the country to meet the demands of a burgeoning sex industry.

Stopping the flow poses enormous challenges for Israel, which has relatively few troops to patrol this vast and dangerous mountainous terrain, where borders exist only on maps and remain largely unrecognized by local tribes. But it is also a new opportunity for Israeli women like Schindler, who are breaking their own barrier by serving on the front lines with men...

...One of the unit's growing priorities is stopping human smuggling, including a worrisome scourge of sex trafficking.

Israel was recently added to a United Nations list of problem nations where girls -- some as young as 12 -- are smuggled from Eastern Europe and Asia and often sold into prostitution rings in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other cities.

Officials said that 3,000 Sudanese women have been intercepted on the border in the past several years. Because Israel has no diplomatic relations with Sudan, it cannot send them home and has tried to assimilate them into Israeli society, placing them in Arab villages or in women's centers...

...The problem is expected to worsen with the arrival in Lebanon of 15,000 UN peacekeeping troops. An Israeli government task force recently warned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that this ``mass of solitary men" will likely take weekend leave in the north of Israel, an influx that ``will increase tenfold the demand for prostitutes."...