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Yitzhak, 20, a conscript serving in the Israeli army's elite Givati brigade, has been stationed in the occupied Gaza Strip for nearly seven weeks. Late one night, he recalls, his patrol was directed to "make our presence felt" in a refugee camp by entering houses, dragging all the male occupants outside and beating them severely. "The men screamed in pain," said Yitzhak of the victims. Some soldiers, repelled by their mission, maneuvered to act as cover outside the houses. "No one refused the orders," Yitzhak is quick to point out. But when the mission was over, arguments and even a fistfight broke out between those in the unit who approved of the brutality and those who did not.

Since independence 40 years ago, the Israel Defense Forces have proved a formidable fighting force in five major conflicts and a seemingly endless guerrilla war with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Today, however, the 104,000-strong standing army of the I.D.F. is mired in a different -- and more deeply frustrating -- kind of mission: containing the uprising of 1.4 million Palestinians no longer willing to submit to Israel's 20-year rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That conflict is producing serious moral and emotional problems for many of the 7,000 soldiers on duty in the occupied territories. It is also raising fears among psychologists and army officers that the occupation will cause lasting damage to one of the world's most respected fighting forces -- and Israel's most revered institution. Israel's young soldiers are being asked to shoulder the central burden of the nation: to remain a Jewish democratic state while continuing to occupy the territories by force.

The soldiers face that moral dilemma daily as they struggle to carry out a policy enunciated three weeks ago by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin of using "force, strength and blows" to put down the rioting. Since then Israeli soldiers have wielded boots, batons and rifle butts against hundreds of unarmed Palestinian men, women and children. Israeli officials noted that the policy is far more humane than the earlier approach of using live ammunition against the rioters, which left slightly more than three dozen Palestinians dead. Though the beatings seemed to bring an uneasy calm to the occupied territories, Israel's image in the eyes of the world suffered greatly as civilian injuries mounted.

The beatings have provided only a temporary respite. Last week fresh waves of violence swept over the West Bank and Gaza. For two days the Casbah of Nablus rang with a harsh tattoo as young stick-wielding Palestinian militants pounded on closed shop shutters and metallic junk barricades. Defying a curfew, the youths, armed with slingshots and iron bars, declared the old, walled portion of the West Bank city to be a Palestinian enclave. Forbidden red-black-white-an d-green Palestinian flags waved from the mosques, the gangs controlled the streets, and the army refused to enter.

Overnight, however, heavily reinforced army units retook Nablus. They arrested more than 20 troublemakers and beat countless others. The city and its surrounding refugee camps were placed under a curfew. The violence spread elsewhere, and the army began using bullets once again. Three Palestinians were killed and half a dozen wounded in clashes between troops and stone- throwing protesters in the West Bank village of Anabta.