Israeli reserve soldiers who participated in the war on Gaza confirmed that they do not want to return to fighting in the Strip again, and "will not be part of the Israeli army."
Israeli military medic Yuval Green said he was ordered to burn down a house when he decided to end his reserve duty.
Green spent 50 days in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis earlier this year with the paratrooper unit, sleeping in a house lit by batteries amid the rubble and destruction.
Green, he said, began to question the purpose of the unit’s presence there when he heard that Israel was rejecting Hamas’s demands to end the war and free the hostages.
Green is one of three Israeli reservists who told the British newspaper The Observer that they would not return if called up for military service in Gaza.
Cycle of violence
The three had served their mandatory military service in the Israeli army and returned after the October 7 attacks.
But the behaviour Green says he witnessed from other Israeli soldiers only fuelled his doubts, as he became “despaired” by what he called the “cycle of violence” in Gaza.
“I saw soldiers painting on the walls of houses or stealing all the time,” he said. “They would enter houses for military reasons, looking for weapons, but it was more fun for them when they were looking for souvenirs. They were fond of necklaces with Arabic writing on them and would collect them.”
“Earlier this year, we received an order to burn down a house, and when I raised the matter with the commander of the division, the answers he gave me were not good enough. I said if we are doing all this for no reason, I will not participate, and I left the next day.”
Two of the reservists said they might return to duty if the exchange of attacks between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah group escalated into full-scale war.
The three cite different motivations for their decision not to serve in Gaza again, from the way the Israeli military is conducting the war to the government’s reluctance to approve a hostage deal.
No justification
“Any reasonable person can see that a military presence doesn’t help bring back the hostages, so if we don’t bring back the hostages, everything we do causes more death on our side or the Palestinian side,” said Tal Vardi, who trained reserve tank operators in northern Israel. “I can’t justify this military operation anymore. I don’t want to be part of an army that does this.”
Reservist soldier Michael Ofer Ziv, recalling the IDF’s accidental shooting and killing of three hostages last December, said the incident left him with a strong feeling that once he finished his military service on the Gaza border, he would never serve again.
Ziv returned to the IDF days after the October attacks to serve as an operations officer, which required him to spend hours staring at screens showing live feeds of Israeli drones.
“Suddenly, a car you’ve been following for an hour disappears in a cloud of smoke [after being hit]. It seems unreal. Some were happy to see this because it meant the destruction of Gaza,” he said.
Ziv recalled crying in the bathroom after his unit lost track of a wounded Palestinian child at a checkpoint, saying that “things like that made him question his role in the war and the purpose of the fighting.” The decision to invade Rafah instead of striking a hostage deal “made it clear to him that he would not return to the army,” he said, adding that when he was recently asked to return, he told his commander that he could not do so.
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