Forty-two reserve soldiers signed a letter saying they would not fight in Gaza again if called up
News Desk - The Cradle
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The three men and 39 others signed a protest letter late last month, saying they would not obey a government-issued call to return to the army.
“The six months in which we took part in the war effort proved to us that military action alone will not bring the abductees home,” wrote the signatories of the letter. Ten signed with their full name, and the others signed only with an initial.
“This invasion, apart from endangering our lives and the lives of innocents in Rafah, will not bring back the abductees alive ... It’s either Rafah, or the abductees, and we choose the abductees. Therefore, following the decision to enter Rafah over a deal with the abductees, We, male and female reserve men and women, declare that our conscience does not allow us to give a hand to the abductees’ lives and spoil another deal.”
Signatories included reservists in the Intelligence Corps, the Home Front Command, and infantry, combat engineering, armor, and elite commando units.
Most signatories Haaretz spoke with said their opposition to returning to fight was “unusual” and not shared by many fellow reservists.
Yuval Green, a 26-year-old student and paratrooper medic in the reserves, said that a red line for him was crossed when his commander ordered his unit to burn down a Palestinian house for no reason. His unit stayed in it during the fighting but was now leaving it.
Regarding the consequences he may face if he is called up for duty again but refuses, he stated, “When I believed I should be in the army, I was there and took a risk. So here I’m not risking my life, but my social status, and this risk is worth it to save human life and do what I believe in.”
Michael Ofer Ziv, a 29-year-old operations officer in the Kafir Brigade, cited the army’s killing of civilians for no reason. From the brigade headquarters, he followed in real-time photographs of unmanned drones, which also recorded the Air Force bombings in the Gaza Strip.
“It’s far from you, and the feeling is that it’s not real,” he says. “You see them taking down vehicles, buildings, people. And every time a building comes down, everyone is like, ‘Wow! Yay!’ Many people, including me, have the experience of ‘wow, what a lunatic’, and there are the voices of ‘we show them, fuck them, take revenge’. These are the vibes you hear in the headquarters.”
But after a week or two, he realized that “every time you see it, it’s a building that’s coming down. If there were people in it, then they would die. And even if there are no people there, everything that’s there – televisions, memories, photos, clothes – everything goes. It’s high-rise buildings. They know what the evacuation level is. They keep saying, for example, that 50% have evacuated the area … I thought to myself: ’50 percent has been evacuated from the area, but 50 percent is still there. Meanwhile, there are also bombings in the south of the Gaza Strip, from where we know that no one has been evacuated. On the contrary, everyone fled there.”
Ofer Ziv says that he felt confused when he watched the Air Force bombings from the headquarters. “In the beginning, it is very difficult to say what is justified and what is not,” he says. “From a distance, it is easy to say: ‘This is how it is in war, people are killed,’ but in war, 30,000 people are not killed, most of whom are buried under the rubble when they are bombed from the air. The feeling is of indiscriminate shooting.”
A., a 26-year-old reservist who was tasked with picking targets for assassination, stated that he at first felt it was important to kill the Hamas members, including by dropping bombs on them in their homes with their entire families present.
“When you bomb him, you say: ‘I don’t have a problem that he is now at home with the whole family,’ although there is no indication that killing this person really makes any military sense,” he explained.
But over time, he said, “I felt that what I was doing was futile. We are just chasing heads in order to show some kind of achievement without any strategy or direction.”
He said that about a month into the war, the policy of how many civilians they could kill as “collateral damage” was “very permissive.”
In one case, he picked a target and bombed the man’s house. After the attack, it became clear that the target was outside the house at the time of the bombing and survived, but the bombing killed two women and injured several other people.
“You feel that you are doing something that does not make any military sense, with a risk of very serious injury to people who are undoubtedly innocent, just because you have to show an achievement,” he explained.
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