For Israeli military paramedic Yuval Green, it was the command to burn down a house that made him decide to end his reserve duty.
Green had spent 50 days in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis earlier this year with his paratrooper unit, sleeping in a home lit only by battery-powered fairy lights among the rubble and devastation.
He had begun to have doubts about the unit’s purpose there months earlier when he heard about Israel’s refusal to agree to Hamas’s demands to end the war, along with freeing hostages.
Green is one of three Israeli reservists who told the Observer they will not return if called for military service in Gaza. All three previously undertook compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which forms the backbone of society.
They returned after the 7 October attacks by Hamas militants, when almost 1,200 people were killed in towns and kibbutzim around Gaza and about 250 taken hostage.
But the destructive behaviour Green says he witnessed from other soldiers only fuelled the misgivings that he carried into Gaza, despairing at what he describes as a cycle of violence. He said he had stayed out of a sense of duty to care for those in his unit, who he knew from his years of compulsory military service. They were angry after seeing the devastation wreaked by Hamas’s attacks on Israeli towns, he added.
“I saw soldiers graffiting houses or stealing all the time. They would go into a house for a military reason, looking for weapons, but it was more fun to look for souvenirs – they had a thing for necklaces with Arabic writing that they collected.”
Then, early this year, he said: “We were given an order. We were inside a house and our commander ordered us to burn it down.”
When he raised the issue with the head of his company, he added: “The answers he gave me were not good enough. I said: ‘If we’re doing all of this for no reason, I’m not going to participate.’ I left the next day.”
The IDF’s response to the 7 October attacks has become Israel’s longest war since 1948 and one that has now killed more than 39,000 people in Gaza. Thousands more are believed buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its 2.3 million population displaced. Meanwhile, observers fear the fighting risks spilling over into Lebanon.
Two of the reservists said they could feel compelled to return to service if the near daily exchange of drone attacks, airstrikes and artillery fire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon becomes a fully fledged war.
All three cite different motivations for their decision not to serve in Gaza again, from how the Israeli military is conducting the war to the government’s reluctance to agree to a hostage deal, which offers an end to the fighting.
The three reserve soldiers speaking publicly about their unwillingness to return to service represent a minority, in part because military refusal in Israel is normally considered illegal.
Last month, 41 reserve soldiers signed an open letter declaring that they would no longer continue to serve in the IDF assault on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah.
“The half year in which we took part in the war effort has proven to us that military action alone will not bring the hostages home. Every day that passes endangers the lives of the hostages and the soldiers still in Gaza, and does not restore security to those living on the Gaza and northern borders,” they wrote.
An IDF spokesperson disagreed. “The IDF’s military pressure on Hamas has brought many hostages back home, as it has yesterday when five bodies were recovered by the IDF’s 98th Division,” they said last Thursday.
“The IDF operates according to the law regarding serving in the IDF and the assignment of troops to their duties. Each case of refusal to comply with the duty is assessed considering the relevant circumstances.”
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has pledged to achieve “total victory” in Gaza, arguing that only military pressure will force Hamas to agree to a hostage deal.
“Any reasonable person can see that the military presence is not helping to bring the hostages back,” said civics teacher Tal Vardi, who trained reserve tank operators in northern Israel during his recent time back in the military.
“So if we’re not bringing back the hostages, all this is doing is causing more death on our side or the Palestinian side … I can’t justify this military operation any more. I’m unwilling to be part of a military that’s doing this,” he said.
“If anything, some of these operations have endangered the hostages, and the army has also killed some by mistake,” he said, pointing to an incident last December, when Israeli forces shot dead three hostages in Gaza who approached them waving white flags, in what the IDF said was a case of mistaken identity.
“It was bound to happen,” said reservist Michael Ofer Ziv, who said the incident provoked in him a powerful sense that once he finished his military service on the Gaza border, he would not return. The incident for him symbolised an overall lack of care and he was concerned by a system where mistakes such as this could occur.
Ziv returned to the IDF days after the October attacks to serve as an operations officer, requiring him to spend long hours staring at screens showing a live drone feed of footage from a small section of the enclave. This meant days at a time observing daily Palestinian life, watching as stray dogs or cars crossed bombed-out streets.
“Suddenly, you see a building go up, or a car you’ve been following for an hour suddenly disappear into a cloud of smoke. It feels unreal,” he said. “Some were happy to see this, as it meant seeing us destroy Gaza.”
When ground troops from his unit entered the enclave, his role was to track their movements and activities for support, as well as requesting targets for airstrikes.
“We almost always got approval to shoot,” he said. The approval process with the air forces, he added, “was mainly bureaucracy”.
He was also dismayed at what he described as a lack of clarity for soldiers regarding the rules of engagement, which he said were far more explicit during his compulsory military service, and felt the rules during this war were far looser than anything he previously experienced.
“After they shot the three hostages last December, I tried to remember if I ever saw a document like this – I was supposed to,” he said. “I was sure there was a briefing to the soldiers, but without having any documents to lean on, it’s unclear what people understood.”
An IDF spokesperson denied allegations relating to lax rules of engagement. “The IDF provides extensive training to its soldiers on them and how to act accordingly,” they said. “Additionally, before each military operation, soldiers receive a detailed briefing on the rules. Any accusation regarding the lack of written rules of engagement is completely false.”
Ziv recalled crying in the bathroom after his unit lost track of an injured Palestinian child at a checkpoint. Such things, he said, made him question his own role in the war and the overall purpose of the fighting.
The decision to invade Rafah rather than seal a hostage deal, he said, confirmed for him that he would not return to the military. When recently called upon to do so, he said, he told his commanding officer he could not come back.
“I came after 7 October as I felt like maybe they will rise to the occasion and use us in a way that could be of benefit. But I’m not willing to participate in this, as I don’t trust the government and what they’re trying to do.”
He added: “If something happens in the north, there’s a chance I’d go, but on other hand, I know what it might be like. I know what we did in Gaza – there’s no reason to believe we’d act any differently in Lebanon.”
