ISRAEL - Jan. 29 - Reservists Hit West Bank and Gaza Occupation.

A report in The IHT, quoting Yedioth Ahronoth, says: "More than 60 Israeli Army reservists... have publicly refused to continue serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the ground that Israeli occupation forces there are abusing and humiliating Palestinians". Reservists' petition said: "We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line for the purpose of occupying, deporting, destroying, blockading, killing, starving and humiliating an entire people". Two reservists who drafted the petition - Lt. David Zonshein, a 28-year-old software engineer, and Lt. Yaniv Itzkovich, a 26-year-old university teaching assistant - said their goal was to collect 500 signatures and launch a broad social campaign. Zonshein told Yedioth: "We all have limits. You can be the best officer, [suddenly] you are asked to do things that should not be asked of you, to shoot people, to stop ambulances, to destroy houses in which you don't know if there are people living". They told Yedioth about incidents in which the Army had opened fire on Palestinian children and other civilians who posed no apparent danger to their lives. Later, the Army said in a statement: "To serve in the Israeli Defence Forces is obligatory under the law and there is no place for reserve soldiers to choose what jobs they want and what jobs they don't want. The writers of the petition don't represent the soldiers and officers of the reserve who understand their mission and are working days and nights towards the security of the state of Israel and peace for its citizens". (Most Israeli men are required to serve as army reservists until they are 45 years old, typically spending a few weeks to a month or more each year away from their families and civilian jobs). PM Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin acknowledged that allegations of abuse by the army do happen and should be investigated, but he dismissed the petition and refusals to serve in the army as a "marginal phenomenon". He said the petition "undermines the basic tenet of Israeli democracy. You can't have a government in which people can decide" they will bomb "this target but not that target. You abide by the rule of the majority and the majority has decided this is the government and this is its policy". (Since the Palestinian armed uprising erupted in Sept. 2000, more than 500 Israelis have refused to serve in the occupied territories, including pacifists and veterans, recruits and reservists. Of that number, about 40 have been sentenced to prison terms that are generally brief, including 12 reserve officers. Others have been ignored or given army jobs inside Israel. Ram Rahat, a 45-year-old former combat soldier who refused to serve during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, said the current refusals mirror patterns that emerged in previous conflicts. He said it showed that people who have gone through army reserve duty "a couple of times, going through the territories and seeing the reality of what's going on there, are starting to get fed up with it"). On Feb. 1, the list of reservists signing the petition nearly doubled, with 102 names appearing in its second publication in Haaretz. Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz said on Army Radio he suspected that political motives rather than moral concerns were behind the dissenting reservists' petition. He said: "If there is someone who is organising a campaign on an ideological basis, in my eyes this more than refusal to serve. This is incitement to rebellion. There is no act more serious than that". He said the resisters should be suspended and could be permanently relieved of their command duties. He said senior officers would decide what disciplinary action to take. PM Sharon warned in a newspaper interview that "it will be the beginning of the end of democracy if soldiers don't carry out the decisions of the elected government". (Protests by reservists after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which Sharon as defence minister took all the way to Beirut, are widely considered to have contributed to a subsequent military pullback).