TEL AVIV, Israel — For 270 days, platoon commander Ron Finer fought for Israel, helping reinforce its northern border, and later, dismantling weapons caches in Lebanon. The work was hard, but the fight was just, he believed, as his country battled Hamas in the south and the militant group Hezbollah in the north.
The successive tours left him with emotional scars: Six of the soldiers he fought with died on his last tour, and he narrowly missed being shot in the head.
But the moment he described as like a switch flipping, changing how he saw the conflict entirely, was in March, when Israel ended a ceasefire with Hamas.
"This time it was so clear for me. … They don't want this war to end any time before they conquer the whole Gaza Strip," Finer, 26, said.
So he made up his mind. He decided to refuse a call-up to fight a fourth tour, this time in the Gaza Strip.
Finer is among a new anti-war camp emerging in Israel — soldiers themselves. He has joined a coalition of voices, including the families of hostages and human rights activists, who have been mounting growing protests across Israel, calling for an immediate ceasefire with Hamas and the return of all remaining hostages held in Gaza.
Israel's long war in Gaza, which is approaching nearly two years, has already cost the country tens of billions of dollars, according to a national security think tank, and the lives of almost 900 service members. Soldiers say they are worn out. This spring, about 1,000 reservists signed a petition calling for the war to end. More reservists are quietly finding health or work reasons to avoid new calls up. Several like Finer have gone to prison for refusing. The military is running low on fighters. The Israeli military did not respond to an NPR request for comment.
Finer says the country is at a critical moment.
"Another day we suspend [a ceasefire] is another day Israeli soldiers could die and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the people dying every day also from hunger and also from like airstrikes," he says.
A war with no end
NPR spoke to six reservists and soldiers, including Finer, who had refused service this year. Some expressed moral qualms; others questioned the strategic value of continuing to fight in Gaza.
All said they were disillusioned when Israel walked away from a temporary ceasefire in March, and they were opposed to last week's Cabinet decision to take over Gaza City, the last main area not already under Israeli military control in Gaza.
"War is an option, and it was chosen for us. I think there are always other options," says Ella, a former reservist who quit earlier this year after having doubts about whether extending the war was justified. She asked that only her first name be used because she worked as an intelligence officer dealing with classified information.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's assertion on Sunday that "Israel has no choice" but to pursue an escalation of the war has met stiff resistance from some of the very people who Israel needs to staff its military.
"I served in Gaza 23 years of my life. … I know Gaza by heart," says Matan Vilnai, a former major general and head of Israel's southern command, which encompasses Gaza, during a Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s that came to be known as the Second Intifada.
Vilnai was one of more than 600 former senior military and intelligence officials who signed an open letter earlier this month, asking President Trump to pressure Netanyahu to end the war, arguing that Israel has already achieved its military aims in Gaza.
"We have nothing to do in Gaza. We must go out of Gaza. And we achieve nothing by dominating Gaza," says Vilnai, explaining why he signed the letter.
"In order to save everyone who lives here, we must stop participating in this horrifying routine. Each of us, in our own way," Finer told a rapt audience of demonstrators at a recent anti-war protest in Tel Aviv. "Fighters must stop fighting. Reservists must stop reporting for duty."
"Amputees of the soul"
More than 61,000 Palestinians have been killed or starved to death in the war, Gaza health officials say.
But a figure that has garnered far more alarm in Israel is the spike in death by suicide among soldiers. There were seven known cases in July alone, mostly among soldiers who recently returned from fighting in Gaza.
As the mental cost of fighting the war in Gaza mounts, soldiers who served in Israel's previous conflicts, including a 2014 war in Gaza, have been camping outside the main rehabilitation center overseen by Israel's defense ministry, petitioning to have mental trauma officially recognized as a wartime injury.
"Before I went in, I was a kid with dreams, ambitions, motivation for life, a future. I had everything. When I came out, I came out dead. A walking person without a soul," says Omar Amsalam, 32, who fought in the 2014 Gaza war. "We don't walk around with a tag saying 'combat veteran with PTSD.' We have arms, we have legs — but we are amputees of the soul, and that's something you can't see."
Nadav Weiman works with Breaking the Silence, an organization run by former Israeli soldiers which collects testimonies about Israel's occupation of the West Bank — and now, the war in Gaza. Weiman says the organization is getting twice as many anonymous tips as before the war, mostly from soldiers fighting in Gaza who are troubled by what they are witnessing or being asked to do.
"You know, when you interview a lot of people, you know that when somebody speaks very monotone like this, trying to avoid or not being attached to what he did, that's the hardest thing," says Weiman,
There is concern even among those who do support Israel's army that it is wasting its blood and treasure on a war that will provide no more strategic gains.
"There isn't any mother in the world that can understand what is the feeling to take your son to the war. But we did it, because we wanted to protect our country," says Agamit Gelb. On Oct. 7, 2023, after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, she helped her son report for duty.
In early August, she and several hundred other mothers of soldiers, both past and present, marched south around the Nahal Oz kibbutz, near Israel's border with Gaza, to call for a ceasefire. She says her activism has taken on extra urgency now that she anticipates her second son is about to be drafted.
"Our sons are fighting almost two years, and it must end now. [Fighting] doesn't bring back any hostage from Gaza right now, and it only kills more and more soldiers there," says Gelb.
"A religious war"
Gelb's concerns mirror the political tension emerging over the aim of Israel's war in Gaza.
Netanyahu has maintained the purpose of Israel's war in Gaza is to destroy Hamas and free hostages, about 20 of whom are still believed to be alive. Thirty are believed to have died in captivity.
Netanyahu is politically reliant on two far-right ministers, who have far bigger plans. They have explicitly and repeatedly said Gaza should be destroyed, Palestinians removed to another country, and Jewish people allowed to build settlements in Gaza again — as they did until 2005, when Israel decided to dismantle those settlements and withdraw military forces stationed on the ground in Gaza.
These ministers' aspiration to annex and settle Gaza exceeds what many soldiers and reservists said they can support.
"There are no military targets for this mission. It's not a military mission anymore. It's become a religious war. And I'm not willing to risk my life fighting other people's wars," says one former reservist tank commander, who requested anonymity because he fears being attacked abroad for serving in Israel's military.
He said he had fought four tours in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, and served on missions attempting to free some of the hostages taken by Hamas.
"I now acknowledge that it's a dream. We couldn't have any military way of bringing the people back," he says. On the other hand, nearly 150 hostages have been returned through negotiated deals, he points out. For more people to come home, he says, the fighting needs to end.
Alon Avital and Itay Stern contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, Israel.
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