Published: 7 March 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Army reserve medics and cyber specialists will stop reporting for duty; Entebbe veterans invoke PM’s dead brother in protest.
Nearly all reserve members of an Israeli Air Force fighter jet squadron on Sunday said they would not show up to one of their planned training sessions later this week, in protest of the government’s plan to radically restrict the power of the country’s judiciary.
The pilots are the most-high profile of a growing list of IDF personnel protesting the overhaul.
More than 200 reserve doctors and 150 cybers-pecialists say they won’t show up for duty if the government does not halt the legislative process related to the judicial coup
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the reservists ’threat not to report for duty as an “existential” threat to Israel.
“Israeli society has always rejected conscientious objectors and “sanctified the joint service… We never gave these objectors a foothold anywhere, neither in the regular army nor in the reserves,” he said.
Out of the 40 reservists in the IAF’s 69th Squadron, 37 said they were boycotting the Wednesday exercises.
The squadron — known as the Hammers — operates the F-15I fighter jets out of the Hatzerim Airbase in southern Israel.
In 2007, the squadron carried out a strike on Syria’s nuclear reactor, in a mission known to much of the world as Operation Orchard and in the IDF as Outside the Box. It has also been involved in carrying out hundreds of strikes against Iranian entrenchment in Syria over the past decade, receiving a citation from the military chief in 2018 over the operations.
The reservists notified IAF chief Tomer Bar and the commander of the squadron of their intention to not show up for training this week but said they would report for duty if required for operational missions.
