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Sivan Rauscher, the chief executive of the Israeli cybersecurity firm SAM Seamless Network, walked into her company’s Tel Aviv headquarters in early May to find half the staff missing.

Many of her key engineers were gone. The company’s chief technology officer was nowhere to be found. But Ms Rauscher was not surprised at the empty desks.

More than two thirds of her staff are alumni of the Israeli military’s Unit 8200, an elite signals intelligence force akin to Britain’s GCHQ or the American NSA.

That week the Israeli military was locked in serious fighting with Palestinian militants in Gaza and many of the Unit 8200 veterans were called up as reservists in case a full-blown war broke out.

The fighting calmed after a few days and the engineers returned to work. Ms Rauscher, who was a captain in Unit 8200 and still serves in the reserves, said half-jokingly that she realised how her firm’s workflow would be disrupted in the event of a major conflict.

“If something happens in the summer we’re in big trouble because we will lose half the team. It’s a risk that we need to learn to mitigate,” she said.