Soldiers’ mothers unite to call for an end to the war

As the IDF escalates its harrowing Gaza operations in its proclaimed bid to destroy Hamas, groups of Israeli mothers are surging to the fore of efforts to stop the war — and save their sons.

Parents of Combatants Screaming Stop, The Mothers’ Cry and MomsUp23 each include mothers of soldiers in Gaza and each want the war ended immediately, with all hostages returning home. The first two groups are more ready to go against the grain and highlight the wars’ devastating toll on Gazans, while the third is larger and, according to one of its leaders, rejects the notion that the IDF is carrying out any wrongs or crimes against the Palestinians.

All three groups are on high alert now because of the Gideon’s Chariot Operation, a recent escalation of the war requiring more manpower and reserve call-ups. Gideon’s Chariots, with its plan to “concentrate” and force Palestinian civilians southward, is a recipe for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in the view of several leading Israeli legal scholars.

The founder of the Mothers' Cry, Michal Brody-Bareket, recently wrote an opinion piece in Haaretz calling on soldiers not to report for duty in Gaza and wondered how commanders could live with themselves if they led them into battle.

Moreover, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Jewish fundamentalist Religious Zionism party, told loyalists during a speech that Gazans will be “allowed” only one bowl of soup and one pita a day, caloric strictures that would cause them to die of starvation.

Naturally, the mothers are worried for their children’s fate too, especially since it seems the goal of destroying Hamas will take a long time, if it is possible at all.

“We, as mothers, are safeguarding our offspring. It is our natural role to be vigilant for our children,” says Inbal Arazy, an activist in Parents of Combatants Screaming Stop, which she says counts more than 600 supporters. By contrast, men, generally speaking, are caught in an “inner conflict” over the war because their identities are bound up with the military, she says.

“It’s in the DNA of the Israeli male to serve in the army and be loyal to everything the state and army demand. It’s harder for them to come and oppose. It’s easier for women to shout for the end of the war and to criticise the army.”

Arazy’s son, whom she declined to name, has been in Gaza nearly all of the time since the ground operation was first launched in the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal onslaught on October 7, 2023.

Parents of Combatants Screaming Stop, which demonstrates, petitions and lobbies, was founded in April 2024 before the IDF’s incursion into Rafah. “We realised the war was being run out of political considerations,” it says, “for the government’s survival and for messianic voices that say we have to settle Gaza,” believed by key coalition partners to be an integral part of divinely endowed territory that must be made part of Israel to enable the coming of the messiah.

Arazy, and for that matter all of the mothers’ groups, do not buy into that expansionist mythology. “We knew that continued fighting would just endanger the hostages and the soldiers,” she says.

The government maintains that continued military pressure on Hamas is needed to force it to free the hostages and to achieve “total victory” over the terrorist group. Government backers view the mothers’ groups as misleading, defeatist and denigrating the sacrifices made by troops on behalf of the country.

But Arazy says it is the government which is the betrayer for failing to act on chances to bring all the hostages home through negotiations. “This violates the trust between citizens and the government and even more so, the trust with mothers. “Our child could be kidnapped and the government won’t do its utmost to bring him back. We are not willing to sacrifice our sons in this way.”

Arazy accuses the government of carrying out three war crimes simultaneously by prolonging the war. “The crimes are against me, my son and of course, the civilians in Gaza.” She lives in constant fear for her son, she says, and “he lives in danger for his life, sees his friends wounded and killed and it’s a crime because this isn’t necessary any more. The state of Israel isn’t in danger now.”

In the view of Michal Brody-Bareket, the founder of the Mothers’ Cry, the country — and the mothers —are at a critical juncture. “There is a sword hanging over our necks 24/7 in the form of [possible] call ups for reserve duty.” Her 22-year-old son served in Gaza for a long time, and now, with Gideon’s Chariots, she is extremely worried he will be sent back there.

Brody-Bareket is against the idea of a military operation by Israel in response to the Hamas attack. “I understood that you cannot fix things with more death and destruction.”

The longer the war has gone on, more mothers have identified with the group, which cooperates with the left-wing Arab-Jewish organisation Standing Together. Mothers without sons in the army and mothers of teens became active.

The Mothers’ Cry does not cozy up to the mainstream and therefore receives little coverage from the media, which generally ignores the suffering of Palestinians and those who speak about it. Last week, activists demonstrated at the entrance of an air force base, holding pictures of Gaza children killed by Israel. Such actions are considered treasonous by many. Last year, Brody-Bareket was struck in the head by a bottle hurled at her in central Jerusalem as she held up a sign that said “There is no military solution.”

“What is driving the war is to establish settlements in Gaza,” she says. “There are vast forces pushing for this, causing Netanyahu to widen the war and carry out all these crimes. Expulsion and mass killing is all for this objective and they do not care if they harm our own soldiers,” she says.

In her view the heavy civilian toll in Gaza and the continued ordeal of the hostages are two sides of the same coin. “Just as the government is killing vast numbers of civilians in Gaza, so it is also killing the hostages,” she says.

A painful point for Brody-Bareket is that her 22-year-old son and his younger brothers do not read her writings against the war, which recently included a call on commanders to refuse to lead their soldiers into the expanding military operation.

Such a call is unthinkable for another war mother, Dalit Kislev-Spector, a leader of the largest mothers’ group against the war, MomsUp23, which appears to revere the military and rejects criticism of it while blaming the government for leading the country astray.

“We want the hostages back and we want Bibi to go away,” Kislev-Spector, whose husband is in Gaza along with two sons, says, adding that the group, which gets wide media coverage, wants early elections.”

Kislev-Spector, a lawyer who backs the right-wing opposition party Yisrael Beiteinu, says “we started to understand that the war would be long not because it needs to be long but because Netanyahu has other interests and because people in the government are saying we need to go back to Gaza. We started to suspect that this is a political war, not a war to bring back the hostages.”

In Kislev-Spector’s view, a war mother’s duty right now is to offer a voice on behalf of sons in Gaza who are in no condition to evaluate what the politicians are doing. “It is not possible for the soldiers in their mental state to deal with this. It is our job to make sure they are not fighting a political war.”

The idea of mothers being able to help stop military involvement has precedent in Israel. In 2000, the IDF withdrew from southern Lebanon partly because an organisation founded by four mothers of soldiers rallied support for a pullout. But that was under a more moderate government than Netanyahu and his fundamentalist partners.

From the point of view of Matan Peleg, former CEO of the hard-right Im Tirzu youth movement, it’s now full steam ahead with the war. “What is needed is to liquidate Hamas,” said Peleg, who has served 270 days in Gaza and Lebanon since October 7, 2023. “Calls for stopping the war are defeatist and harm the hostages. These [women’s] groups are mistaken and misleading. The people of Israel need complete victory to ensure the future of the state of Israel.”