Israel’s ‘refuseniks’: A growing number of soldiers are refusing to serve in Netanyahu’s war on Gaza

T he Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered the Israel Defense Forces to step up the offensive on Gaza City, despite internal and international condemnation.

Amid accusations by the International Association of Genocide Scholars that Israel is committing genocide, some 40,000 reserve soldiers were called up to report for duty on Tuesday, August 2. An additional 90,000 are due for mobilisation by the end of the first quarter of 2026. But reports suggest that the numbers willing to accept their orders are dwindling.

Israel has mandatory national conscription for those leaving high school for a period of 18 to 36 months, with some exemptions. This is followed by compulsory reserve duty for some units, normally until the age of 40. In the wake of the October 7 2023, attacks on Israel by Hamas, 360,000 reservists were reportedly called up for duty, alongside the 100,000 high-school leavers on active duty.

This was one of the largest mobilisations in Israel’s history. There was an unprecedented 120% response rate, as Israelis rallied around the flag and other people not subject to the call-up opted to serve.

After almost two years of fighting, reports suggest that commanders are now struggling to find enough reservists willing to serve. Some calculations show a 30% downturn in reserve deployment. Kan, Israel’s national broadcaster, puts the decline closer to 50%.

Reasons vary among those who choose not to fulfil their reserve duty. A report from left-wing Israeli media outlet, +972mag, calculates that only about 1,500, roughly 1.5%, of soldiers who refused between October 2023 and April 2025 did so out of ideological and ethical concerns.

The majority have refused because they have grown weary of a war that has failed to achieve a resolution nor succeeded in returning the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. Many are suffering from exhaustion, both physical and emotional.

Whatever their motivations, the unwillingness of a proportion of Israeli reserve soldiers to continue to fight poses a potential problem for Netanyahu in his pursuit of eradicating Hamas in Gaza or in conducting wars on other fronts. Simply put, the IDF cannot carry out its operations without sufficient soldiers.

Even if refusal numbers do not reach such a tipping point, their public declarations of refusal carry political clout. Historically, Israelis have refused to serve as a means to challenge the policies of the Israeli government.

A distinction should be made between the smaller numbers of Israeli teenagers who refuse to enlist in the IDF altogether and those who have refused their reserve duty. Some high-school refusers declare themselves as “conscientious objectors”. They tend to do so out of ideological contempt for the IDF and in rejection of the Israeli occupation of Palestinians.

A 2021 refusal letter by a group of high school students spelled it out: “It is our duty to oppose this destructive reality by uniting our struggles and refusing to serve these violent systems – chief among them the military.”

As I discovered in my research on Israeli peace and anti-occupation activism, these teenagers tend to be dismissed as radical anarchists. Reservists who refuse to return to serve are also not well received by the majority of Israeli society, but they are given a degree of support and sympathy because they have already served in the IDF, thus fulfilling their national duty.

As one recent refuser wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times, “Refusing to serve is not betrayal of the state. Refusing is the only way to save it.”

Israel’s history of military ‘refuseniks’

The first significant wave of reservist refusal came with the outbreak of the first Lebanon war in 1982. Almost 3,000 reservists signed a petition stating that they did not join the Israeli Defense Forces to “solve the Palestinian problem by warfare”. Some 160 were jailed. A movement called Yesh Gvul (There is a Limit) emerged and has promoted subsequent waves of reservist refusal, and supported those who are imprisoned.

The movement encouraged selective refusal to serve in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in response to the Israeli army’s brutal repression of the first Palestinian uprising in 1987. As Israeli scholar, Benjamin Kidron, noted in his book Refusenik!, they marked a difference between “legitimate” duties of the IDF in defending Israel and “unacceptable” assignments in the occupied territories.

During the second Intifada, beginning in 2000, there was a further wave of selective refusal, with the reservists gaining some legitimacy by “speaking with the authority of having come directly from the field”.

Threats of refusal have also been used as leverage for other issues dominating Israeli society. At the height of the protests against the proposed judicial reforms in summer 2023, 1,000 elite Israeli combat pilots refused to serve until the reforms were abandoned. They cited the government’s plans as a threat to Israeli democracy.

With an increasing number of Israelis taking a public stand against the Israeli government, the wave of soldiers refusing to serve could affect the ability of Netanyahu to continue his assault on Gaza as planned. But as the past two years have shown, Netanyahu has not been persuaded by either domestic or international pressure to abandon his war on Gaza. It is unlikely that he will change course now.

Sources:

▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in Europeans TODAY on 9 September 2025. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Dreamstime/Elenarostunova.