Every person in his platoon knew someone who was killed. Yuval Green, 26, knew at least three. He was a reservist, a medic in the Israel Defense Forces paratroopers, when he first heard news of the Hamas attack on October 7.
“Israel is a small country. “Everyone knows each other,” he says.
That day, Islamist militants killed 1,200 people and 251 more were kidnapped and taken to Gaza. There are 97 hostages left in Gaza and around half of them are believed to be alive.
Yuval immediately responded to his country’s call to arms. It was a mission to defend the Israelis. He remembers the horror of entering devastated Jewish communities near the Gaza border. “You saw…dead bodies in the streets, cars pierced by bullets.”
Back then there was no question about showing up to serve. The country was under attack. The hostages had to be rescued.
Then came the fighting in Gaza itself. He saw things that can no longer be erased from his mind, like the night he saw cats eating human remains on the road.
“It’s like an apocalypse. You look to your right, you look to your left, All you see are destroyed buildings, buildings damaged by fire, by missiles, by everything. That’s Gaza right now”.
A year later, the young man who reported to serve on October 7 refuses to fight.
Yuval is the co-organizer of a public letter signed by more than 165 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservists – at last count – and a smaller number of permanent soldiers than refuse to serve or threaten to refuse unless the hostages are releasedsomething that would require a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.
In a country still traumatized by the worst violence in its history, those who refuse to serve for reasons of conscience are a minority in an army that includes about 465,000 reservists.
There is another factor at play for some IDF reservists: exhaustion.
According to Israeli media reports, An increasing number of reservists are not reporting for service. The Times of Israel newspaper and several other media outlets cited military sources as saying that there has been a drop of between 15% and 25% of troops reporting, mainly due to exhaustion from the long periods of duty required.
The change in Israel’s sentiment
Even if there is no widespread public support for those who refuse to serve for reasons of conscience, there is evidence that some of the key demands of those who signed the letter are shared by a growing number of Israelis.
A recent opinion poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) indicated that among Israeli Jews 45% wanted the war to end – with a ceasefire to bring the hostages home – versus 43% who wanted the IDF to continue fighting to destroy Hamas.
Significantly, the IDI survey also suggests that the sense of solidarity that marked the first days of the war as the country recovered from the trauma of October 7 has been overtaken by the resurgence of political divisions: only 26% of Israelis believe that there is now a sense of togetherness, while 44% say there is not.
At least part of this has to do with a frequently expressed sentiment, especially among those on the left of the political arc.that the war is being prolonged at the behest of far-right parties whose support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to remain in power.
Even former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party who was dismissed by the prime minister last month, cited the failure to release the hostages as one of the key disagreements with the ruler.
“There is and will not be any atonement for the abandonment of the captives,” he stated. “It will be a mark of Cain on the forehead of Israeli society and those who lead this wrong path.”
Netanyahu, who along with Gallant faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, has repeatedly denied that and has stressed his commitment to freeing the hostages.
The seeds of rejection
The seeds of Yuval’s refusal date back to the days immediately after the war began.
At that time The vice president of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), Nissim Vaturi, called for the Gaza Strip to be “wiped from the face of the Earth”.
For his part, prominent Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, referring generally to Palestinians in Gaza, said: “If you don’t kill them, they will kill you.” The rabbi emphasized that soldiers were only to do what the army ordered them to do and that state law did not allow the killing of civilians.
But the language, which is by no means limited to the two examples above, worried Yuval.
“People were talking about killing the entire population of Gaza, as if it were some kind of academic idea that made sense.…And in this atmosphere, soldiers are entering Gaza just a month after their friends were massacred, hearing about soldiers dying every day. And soldiers do many things.”
There have been social media posts of soldiers in Gaza abusing prisoners, destroying property and mocking Palestinians.including numerous examples of soldiers posing with people’s possessions, such as women’s dresses and underwear.
“At that time I was trying to fight it as much as I could,” Yuval says. “There was a lot of dehumanizing and vindictive atmosphere.”
His personal turning point came with an order he couldn’t obey.
“They told us to burn a house, and I went to my commander and asked him, ‘Why are we doing that?’ And the answers he gave me just weren’t good enough.
I was not willing to burn a house for no reason that made sense, without knowing that this served a certain military purpose, or any kind. So I said no and left.”
That was his last day in Gaza.
In response, the IDF said its actions were “based on military necessity and in accordance with international law” and noted that Hamas “illegally embeds its military assets in civilian areas.”
Three of the reservists refusing to serve spoke to the BBC. Two agreed to give their names, while a third requested anonymity because he feared repercussions.
They all emphasize that they love their country, but the experience of war and the failure to reach an agreement to free the hostages led them to a defining moral choice.
“People spoke calmly about abuses or murders”
One soldier, who asked to remain anonymous, was at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport when news of the Hamas attacks began to arrive. He remembers feeling shocked at first. Then a ringing sensation in the ears.
“I remember the drive home… The radio is on and people are calling and saying, ‘My dad was just kidnapped, help me.’ Nobody is helping me.’ “It was truly a living nightmare.”
This was the moment the IDF was made for, he felt. It wasn’t like raiding houses in the occupied West Bank or chasing down stone-throwing youths. “Probably for the first time I felt like I had enlisted for a real self-defense action.”
But his vision transformed as the war progressed. “I guess I no longer felt like I could honestly say that this campaign was about protecting Israeli lives.”
This, he says, was based on what he saw and heard among comrades. “I try to have empathy and say, ‘This is what happens to people who are broken by war…’ but it was hard to miss how broad this discourse was.”
The soldier remembers that his comrades boasted, even to their commanders, about beating “defenseless Palestinians.” And heard more chilling conversations.
“People spoke quite calmly about cases of abuse or even murder, as if it were a technicality, or with real serenity. “That obviously surprised me.”
The soldier also says that he witnessed how they blindfolded the prisoners and did not allow them to move “basically during their entire detention… and they gave them amounts of food that left me in shock.”
When his first tour of duty ended he promised not to return.
The IDF referred me to a statement from last May that said any abuse of detainees was strictly prohibited. It also noted that three meals a day were provided, “in quantity and variety approved by a qualified nutritionist.”
The statement added that handcuffing of detainees was only carried out “when the security risk requires it” and “an examination is carried out every day… to ensure that the handcuffs are not too tight.”
The UN has said that reports of alleged torture and sexual violence by Israeli guards were “extremely illegal and disgusting” and were possible because of the “absolute impunity”.
“Fertile ground to promote brutality”
Michael Ofer-Ziv, 29, knew two people from his village who were murdered on October 7, including Shani Louk, whose body was paraded through Gaza in the back of a van in what became one of the most shared images of the war. “That was hell,” he says.
Michael was already a committed leftist who advocated political, not military, solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, like his comrades, he believed that reporting for reserve duty was correct.
“I knew that military action was inevitable… and in some ways justified, but I was very concerned about the form it might take.”
His job was to serve as an operations officer in a brigade war room, observing and directing the action transmitted by drone cameras in Gaza. At times, he encountered the physical reality of war.
“We went to look for some documents somewhere in the main command of the Gaza area,” he recalls. “And at some point we opened the window… and the stench was like a butcher shop… Like in the market, where it is not very clean.”
Once again, it was a comment overheard during a discussion between comrades that helped spur him into action.
“I think the most horrible statement I heard was from someone who told me that the children who were saved in the last war in Gaza (in 2014) became the October 7 terrorists, which I bet is true in some cases… but definitely not in all.”
Such extreme opinions existed among a minority of soldiers, he says, but the majority were “simply indifferent to what is called ‘collateral damage’, or Palestinian lives”.
Michael is also Dismayed by statements that Jewish settlements should be built in Gaza after the war, a stated goal of far-right government ministers and even some members of Netanyahu’s Likud party.
The figures suggest that there are an increasing number of officers and troops within the IDF who come from what is called a “national religious” background: they are supporters of far-right Jewish nationalist parties advocating colonization and annexation of Palestinian landsand are firmly opposed to a Palestinian state.
According to research by the Israel Center for Public Affairs, a non-governmental think tank, the number of such officers graduating from the military academy increased from 2.5% in 1990 to 40% in 2014.
Ten years ago, one of Israel’s leading authorities on the matter, Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, warned about what he called the “religization” of the military. “Within this context, messages about Jewish superiority and demonization of the enemy are fertile ground for encouraging brutality and freeing soldiers from moral limitations.”
The decisive moment for Michael Ofer-Ziv arrived when the IDF shot three Israeli hostages in Gaza in December 2023. The three men approached the army naked to the waist and one was holding a stick with a white cloth. The IDF said a soldier felt threatened and opened fire, killing two hostages. A third was wounded but then shot again and killed when a soldier ignored his commander’s ceasefire order.
“I remember thinking what level of moral corruption we have reached… that this can happen. And I also remember thinking, There’s just no way this is the first time (innocent people have been shot and killed)… It’s just the first time we’re hearing about this because they’re hostages. “If the victims were Palestinians, we would never know about it.”
The IDF said reservists’ refusal to serve is addressed on a case-by-case basis; and Prime Minister Netanyahu insists that Israel’s military is “the most moral army in the world.”
For most Israelis, the IDF is the guarantor of their security; They helped found Israel in 1948 and are an expression of the nation: every Israeli citizen over 18 who is Jewish (and also from the Druze and Circassian minorities) must serve.
Those who refuse to serve have attracted some hostility. Some prominent politicians, such as Miri Regev, a cabinet member and former IDF spokesperson, have called for action. “Those who refuse to serve should be arrested and prosecuted,” he said.
But so far the government has avoided taking harsh measures because, according to Yuval Green, “the military realized that they only draw attention to our actions, so they try to let us go quietly.”
For those who must begin their military service and refuse, the sanctions are harsher. Eight conscientious objectors who were supposed to begin their military service at the age of 18, who are not part of the reservist group, have served sentences in a military prison.
The future character of the Jewish State
The soldiers I spoke to described a mix of anger, disappointment, hurt, or “silence” from their former comrades.
“I strongly oppose them (the reservists who refuse to serve),” says Maj. Sam Lipsky, 31, a reservist who fought in Gaza during the current war but is now based outside the Strip. He accuses the group that refuses service of being “very political.” and focus on opposing the current government.
“I don’t have to be a Netanyahu supporter to not appreciate people who use the military, an institution we should all support, as an instrument for political purposes.”
Lipsky supports what he sees as Israel’s mainstream right, not the far right represented by government figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister who has been convicted of inciting racism and supporting terrorism, and the finance minister, Belazel Smotrich. who recently called for Gaza’s population to be halved through “voluntary migration.”
Major Lipsky recognizes the suffering of civilians in Gaza and does not deny the images of dead and maimed women and children.
As we speak at her home in southern Israel, her two young children are sleeping in the next room. “There is no way to wage war and carry out a military campaign without these images being produced,” he says.
He then uses an expression he has heard in the past from Israeli leaders: “You can’t mow the lawn without the grass flying. “It’s not possible.”
He says that the fault lies with Hamas, which went to “randomly kill as many Jews as possible, women, children and soldiers.”
The imperative to wage war has postponed a deepening struggle over the future character of the Jewish state.
It is, to a large extent, a conflict between the secularist ideals held by people like Michael Ofer-Zif and Yuval Green, and the increasingly powerful religious right represented by the settlement movement and its defenders in Netanyahu’s cabinet, including figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Add to that persistent and widespread anger over the government’s attempts to dilute the authority of the judiciary in 2023 (which sparked mass demonstrations in the months leading up to October 7), and the stage is set for turbulent politics long after. for the war to end.
On both sides it is not uncommon to hear people talk about a fight for the soul of Israel.
The night I met him, Major Lipsky was packing to return to military service, certain of his duty and responsibility. There will be no peace until Hamas is defeated.
Among the refusing-to-serve reservists I spoke to there was a determination to stand up for their principles. Michael Ofer-Ziv could leave Israel, as he is not sure if he can be happy in the country. “It seems less and less likely that I will be able to maintain the values that I have and want the future that I want for my children living here, and that is very scary,” she says.
Yuval Green is training as a doctor and hopes a deal can be reached between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.
“I believe that in this conflict there are only two sides, not the Israeli side and the Palestinian side. There is the side that supports violence and the side that supports, you know, the search for better solutions.”
There are many Israelis who would disagree with that analysis, but that won’t stop their mission.
click here to read more stories from BBC News Mundo.
Subscribe here to our new newsletter to receive a selection of our best content of the week every Friday.
You can also follow us on YouTube, instagram, TikTok, x, Facebook and in our new whatsapp channel.
And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and activate them.
- Satellite images showing how Israel is dividing northern Gaza from the rest of the Palestinian territory, according to BBC analysis
- “There are no surgeons or a single ambulance… The wounded arrive on foot or in carts pulled by animals”: the story of one of the few doctors left in Gaza