He was an IDF officer but now he says he'd rather go to jail than participate in the Gaza war

This time last year, Michael Ofer-Ziv was halfway through his military work on the war in Gaza. The reservist was called up a week after the devastating Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. 

The 29-year-old says he was torn about whether to serve with the Israel Defence Forces or not. A self-proclaimed leftist, he says he was abroad when the call came, and was hesitant to accept. But emotions among friends and family were running high. His family knew some of the victims killed at the site of the Nova music festival, one of the areas the militants had targeted.

So Ofer-Ziv reported for duty on Oct. 13, 2023, serving as a control officer for the next two months out of Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert in southern Israel, near the border with Gaza. 

"As a lefty, I do not believe that military action will solve anything in the long term," he said during an interview with CBC News. 

"But it was very clear that in the short term, there was a need to re-establish the border to protect civilians on our side." 

However, even during his term, his apprehension toward the military's stated goals for the war remained in the back of his mind. In June, after a break, he officially refused to return — a decision that could mean jail time. 

Ofer-Ziv is now among over 100 Israeli servicemen and women who have signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, refusing to return to service without an immediate ceasefire deal in Gaza and return of the Israeli hostages who remain there. The letter, which is still collecting signatures, had reached 165 at time of publication.

Conscientious objectors — also called refusers or refuseniks in Israel — reject the mandatory call to service over moral or political grounds, and can face jail time for their actions. Though they remain a minority of the population, the country has seen recent high-profile cases of young refusers.

Netanyahu's office declined to comment to CBC on the letter and on refusers protesting the war in Gaza. 

The IDF said in a statement that any narrative suggesting an uptick in refuseniks is "false," and that the cases described are "marginal." 

"Since the outbreak of the war, hundreds of thousands of reservists have been called up, some of whom continue to be actively deployed even now."

Ofer-Ziv was part of the brigade command unit, which controls the movement of troops in the battlefield. He was stationed in a "war room" at Sde Teiman, where he would monitor a portion of the ground operations in Gaza live through screens. He described it as the "cool-headed" team driving the fight on the ground. 

(Sde Teiman would later gain infamy, as it was partially converted into a detention camp during the war and faced allegations of IDF soldiers abusing Palestinian detainees. Ofer-Ziv was not involved with the detention camp operations.) 

He said he couldn't share too many details of his time there, but said it was an environment where officers were constantly debating where, who and what to strike next. And between those debates and the high-stress environment he was in, compounded by a lack of sleep and separation from his family, Ofer-Ziv says making decisions was difficult.