Hawzah News Agency- According to a report by 972 MAGAZINE, No one can state precise numbers. No political party or leader calls for it explicitly. But anyone who has spent time at anti-government protests or on Hebrew-language social media in recent weeks knows it to be true: it is becoming increasingly legitimate to refuse to report for military service in Israel — and not only among the radical left.

In recent weeks, the media has reported a significant decline in soldiers showing up to reserve duty. Although the exact numbers are a closely guarded secret, the army informed Defense Minister Israel Katz in mid-March that the attendance rate stood at 80 percent, compared to around 120 percent immediately after October 7. According to Kan, Israel’s national broadcaster, that number was a fudge: the true rate is closer to 60 percent. Other reports speak of attendance rates of 50 percent or lower, with some reserve units resorting to trying to recruit soldiers via social media.

At the start of the war, the army stated that it had recruited around 295,000 reservists on top of the roughly 100,000 soldiers in regular service. If reports about 50-60 percent attendance in the reserves are accurate, that means over 100,000 people have stopped showing up for reserve duty. “That’s a huge number,” Menuchin noted. “It means the government will have a problem continuing the war.”

The majority of those defying enlistment orders appear to be what’s known as “gray refusers” — people who have no real ideological objection to the war but rather have grown demoralized, weary, or fed up that it is dragging on for so long. Alongside them are a small but growing minority of reservists who refuse on ethical grounds.

However, according to Yuval Green — who refused to continue serving in Gaza after disobeying an order to set fire to a Palestinian home, and who now leads an anti-war movement called "Soldiers for the Hostages ” with 220 reservists signed on to its refusal statement — this binary categorization doesn’t tell the whole story.

Last week, Haaretz published an op- ed by the mother of a soldier who stated: “Our children will not fight in a messianic war of choice.” Another op- ed in the same newspaper by an anonymous soldier declared: “The current war in Gaza is meant to buy political stability with blood. I will not take part in it.”