On June 16, 2024—just shy of a year ago—an Israeli journalist published an alarming article on the popular Hebrew-language news site Mako. The army, Shai Levy wrote, was heading for a crisis. Many IDF brigades and battalions made up primarily of reservists were operating at 60 or 70 percent of full strength, or even less. Senior officers reported that the situation was already dire and “expected to get worse.” One tank-battalion commander told Levy: “In this last round [of calling up reservists] we dropped down to a 60-percent rate of reporting for duty. Soldiers were injured; one has a wife with a high-risk pregnancy; a second one’s household is falling apart and he’s in the process of getting divorced. . . There is no way to tell them to show up after they already did 140 days of reserve duty.” One infantry-brigade commander added that his battalion commanders see the situation getting worse and “expect that there will be a sharp drop in turnout and a crisis for which we need to prepare.”

The story kicked off a discussion in Israeli media, which has gained fresh momentum in recent months and been picked up and amplified in the international press. The issue is indeed an important one: if the IDF is facing a shortage of soldiers on the level predicted by much of this news coverage, it could lose its ability to continue waging a multi-front war in accordance with the government’s stated objectives. Moreover, if reservists in large numbers aren’t showing up for duty, Israel could be facing a possible collapse of the most important of all military resources: morale.

My aim in this essay is to show what these reports get right and why the concerns they raise must be taken seriously, as well as what they miss and why the direst predictions have not come true. To do this, we need to begin by putting the current war in historical perspective.

The multifront conflict Hamas launched against Israel with its gruesome atrocities of October 7, 2023 is unique in numerous ways: its duration, which at 612 days and counting makes it by far Israel’s longest; the filming and sharing on social media of sadistic acts of terror by Hamas operatives; the devastating use of new technologies such as attack and suicide drones by both sides; the IDF’s stunning success in detonating the beepers of Hizballah operatives in Lebanon in the most pinpointed counterterrorism operation in history; and the subsequent decapitation of that organization’s leadership through precision blows guided by staggeringly accurate intelligence.

Yet to understand what enabled Israel to recover from the massive failures of October 7 and to end up better off strategically on every front than it was at the outset of the conflict, it’s necessary to look at the factor that has been most essential in warfare since before the dawn of recorded history: manpower. Shortly after Israel won its independence in 1949, the founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, developed a strategic doctrine based on the sober recognition that Israel would remain vastly outnumbered by the populations of the Arab countries committed to its destruction. The only way to preserve security without crippling the Jewish state’s fledgling economy was to draft the vast majority of citizens, male and female, into an army in which they would serve from ages eighteen to twenty-one. At the end of that period, a fraction would remain as officers and NCOs while most men and some women would transfer to the reserves and remain there until their forties. During those two decades, they were expected to spend a few weeks each year training to maintain battle readiness, and to take part in emergency operations whenever needed.

The regular army of young conscripts and their commanders was designed to be strong enough to defend Israel’s borders against infiltrators and hold off attacks from large armies for a few days, giving reservists time to mobilize and reach the front lines. This approach was captured in a sentence long accepted as gospel: “The standing army blocks the enemy and the reservists achieve decisive victory.”

That formula was tested most sorely, and vindicated most compellingly, in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Israel was caught by surprise and suffered catastrophic initial losses after simultaneous surprise attacks by Egypt and Syria. The standing army, buttressed by the first reservists to race to the front, showed extraordinary courage and determination in preventing enemy forces from breaking through their lines and reaching the country’s population centers. Large contingents of reservists, who assembled and deployed with unparalleled speed, turned the tide in a matter of days and brought about a stunning victory in less than three weeks.

In key ways, the present conflict has followed the pattern of its predecessor a half-century earlier. While precise numbers are classified, the standing army probably fielded fewer than 50,000 combat soldiers when the current war began, including the support troops responsible for the fighters’ most pressing needs. A force of this size was required just to secure the breached border with Gaza, neutralize the invaders, and prepare to carry the fight to Hamas. But this wasn’t the only urgent task the IDF faced in this moment of crisis: similar numbers of well-trained troops were essential to defend the border with Lebanon against Hizballah, whose elite Radwan Force was far more powerful than Hamas and was poised to carry out an invasion of northern towns; and to deploy throughout Judea and Samaria, lest these areas too become a launching pad for October 7-style attacks.

To field combat forces of the requisite size, roughly 150,000 men and women, the IDF sent emergency call-up notices (tzavei 8, in Hebrew) to almost every reserve combat soldier on its roster, and likewise for the necessary intelligence, transport, supply, logistics, and other forces. Within days, more than 300,000 reservists were in uniform, including over 100,000 combat and support troops who were sent to secure the country’s borders and train for a multi-front war against determined enemies.

In many units, the response rate was 120 percent or higher, a statistic widely trumpeted, generally misunderstood, and crucial for understanding the functioning of reservists throughout the war. In a typical reserve company that requires 100 soldiers to carry out its missions, the IDF allows the roster to be expanded up to an additional 20 percent, enabling it to enlist up to 120 soldiers. This policy, akin to overbooking by airlines, is designed to ensure that the requisite number of soldiers report for duty even after factoring in that some portion won’t show up—for familial, educational, professional, or medical reasons. Indeed, reserve service is effectively voluntary and no sanctions are invoked against those declining to report. As a result, in call-ups for training or guarding a border when the country was not at war, it was considered commendable for a unit to achieve a 100-percent turnout—meaning, in our example, that 100 of 120 actually showed up.

In the wake of Hamas’s barbaric acts of October 7 and the near-universal consensus in Israel that this was “a war for our home” and that everything must be done to bring back the hostages, reservists who had not served for years unhesitatingly reported for duty and thousands who were overseas took the first available flight to join their units. In parallel, thousands of veterans volunteered to fight without having received an order, including many former reservists who had been exempted due to injuries or age and demanded to be reinstated. All of this led to turnout rates of 120 percent, and in some units, the figure was reportedly as high as 150 percent.

While Israeli doctrine calls for reservists to achieve rapid victory and return to civilian life to minimize damage to the country’s economy and social fabric, the length and character of the current war made it necessary for large numbers to remain in uniform for much longer periods. Even after the initial peak needs had diminished and most reservists were released in January or February of 2024, Israel was compelled to maintain a much-greater-than-usual array of troops on all borders, and subsequently to deploy substantial numbers to the theaters where fighting was fiercest—Rafah and other parts of Gaza when the offensive was renewed there in May 2024, and Lebanon when the IDF struck with full force against Hizballah in September 2024.

To make this possible without compelling reservists to exit civilian life for unsustainably long stints, the IDF adopted a strategy of rotation, whereby tens of thousands of veterans served for stretches of two to four months, including a few short leaves during which they could go home, and then went back to being civilians for several weeks before being called up for another round. With the war having recently passed the 600-day mark, large numbers of reservists have been in uniform for more than half of them and tens of thousands have served for 200 days or more—a magnitude unprecedented in Israel’s history.

Are the Reserves on the Verge of Collapse?

During the first several months of the war, Israelis and their supporters abroad saw the reservists as emblems of dedication, heroism, and national unity. That started to change around the time the war hit its one-year mark, when a new set of alarms about the reserves began to be sounded.

The Jerusalem Post ran a headline on October 10, 2024 stating: “IDF soldiers warn they will stop reporting if government does not advance a hostage deal.” The author, Eve Young, noted that 121 reservists were among the signatories of a letter saying they would not serve unless the government moved forward more aggressively towards an agreement with Hamas to release the hostages. Ten days later, Young penned a follow-up in which she quoted one of the letter’s signatories, a reservist who explained he was refusing to serve because of what he saw as the mistreatment of Palestinians in Gaza by the IDF.

In November, a more thoughtful piece by the Times of Israel’s Emmanuel Fabian emphasized the personal toll on reservists, who had been taken away from jobs and families. He cited defense sources saying that reservist units fighting in Lebanon and Gaza had between 75 and 85 percent of their full complement, and added another possible reason for declining willingness to report for duty: “resentment over the failure of the country to draft masses of the ultra-Orthodox community, while the national religious and secular communities serve at high rates.” The same day, Shai Levy wrote another piece in Mako, with similar data and a revised prediction of an upcoming disaster, this time quoting his military sources to the effect that “in the next three to six months the average rate is likely to plummet to 60 percent.” Tellingly, Levy neglected to mention that the disaster he predicted previously hadn’t yet come about. Indeed, he reported that about 75 percent of reservists were showing up for duty, a rate higher than the 60-to-70-percent he had mentioned four months earlier.

March 2025 marked the end of the first round of an Israel-Hamas deal for a ceasefire and the release of some hostages, and Israeli leaders began speaking of a major escalation in the fighting in Gaza and the call-up of tens of thousands of reservists if a new agreement was not reached. This precipitated an escalation in media rhetoric about the widening holes in the ranks of the reservists. According to a Times of Israel story on March 12, 2025, based on reporting in the Israeli daily Haaretz, the crisis was now just around the corner. According to one senior IDF officer, after the high turnout of reservists in the first round, “In the second round, it went down to 90 percent, in the third to 70 percent. In the next one I don’t know if we’ll manage to get to 50-percent response.” A wave of articles along similar lines has appeared in the Israeli press in the last few weeks.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream press in the United States, England, and elsewhere has picked up on the alleged crisis of the reserves, focusing on explanations that highlight divisions in Israeli society, criticism of the government, and the portrayal of the IDF as immoral.

Especially notable was an April broadcast from NPR’s Daniel Estrin that placed front and center the claim that reservists were fed up with the war due to the supposed immorality of the IDF. He quotes an officer in a reserve tank unit as saying: “a lot of people in the Israeli government” desire “an unending war” with the aim of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza. “They don’t care about Palestinians’ lives, about my life, about hostages’ lives,” the officer continued. After noting the decline in the number of reservists reporting for duty, Estrin ends by stating that the “debate among reservists has become public, and it complicates Israeli plans for expanding the war in Gaza.”

Last month, The New Yorker weighed in. Ruth Margalit, writing under the headline “The Israeli Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Gaza,” opens by quoting from a letter that Eran Tamir, a reservist in the infantry, published on the Israeli news site Walla. Referring to the Israeli government, he wrote: “They will say that this is an effort to free the hostages, that this is a war of survival or resurrection, and that this time Hamas will truly be defeated. It’s a deception. . . . It’s legitimate to refuse a war that is our moral low point as a country.” Margalit went on to cite individuals and groups calling for reservists to decline further call-ups. She also wrote about Nir, a reservist still reporting for duty, who said that his unit had 60 percent of its members in the previous round and in this one the number was below 50 percent. “I have no reason to serve besides camaraderie now,” Nir said. “I’m ashamed of my government—of what this country has become.”

While there is indeed much debate among Israelis about the prosecution of the war, the relative priority that should be assigned to securing the hostages’ release and defeating Hamas, the ethical conduct of the IDF, the haredi draft, and other government policies, the picture painted by Estrin and Margalit is highly misleading. Reports like these, as well as some of the articles in the Israeli press, have become vehicles for highlighting and exacerbating the divisions in Israeli society, excoriating the country’s political and military leadership, painting the IDF as an army that is behaving immorally, advocating a hostage deal at all costs, and suggesting that Israel has little choice but to end the war regardless of the consequences.

In the next section, I will turn to the main factors that affect turnout of IDF reservists.

What Reservists Are Sacrificing

While the percentages of reservists reporting for duty cited by the mainstream media are skewed low and predictions of an imminent collapse of the reserve system have proved to be off base, claims about the price reservists and their families are paying are on target, as is the concern that this constant sacrifice is taking a toll on the willingness of many of them to continue serving so frequently and for so long. To appreciate the character of Israel’s combat reservists, to make sense of statistics about those reporting for duty, and to consider how to prevent a possible crisis, it is essential to understand what it is like to be one of those Israelis who have served for hundreds of days and knows that the end is not yet in sight.

I have spoken with many of them during the past twenty months, including my own son who has served in the reserves for nearly 300 days, children of close friends, and students at Shalem College, where I teach and serve on the leadership team. In preparing this essay I sat down individually with a dozen Shalem students, most of whom I have taught personally, for in-depth conversations about their experiences and views. They hail from diverse forces that include infantry, tanks, engineering, mobility units, and search and rescue, and they play roles ranging from regular fighters through squad commanders and officers leading platoons or companies.

The first point that must be stressed is how much time combat reservists have spent in uniform, and how this interferes with their lives as civilians. I will begin with a typical case that I know well: that of my eldest son, Chanan. From the time he began his regular service at age nineteen, Chanan was a regular foot soldier—neither an officer nor a member of an elite unit. When news reached him of Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, he was thirty-three years old, married with three children, and working in a demanding job in real-estate development. He drafted into his reserve infantry company immediately and served for four-and-a-half months, first training intensively and then seeing action in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, where one of his comrades was killed and a second seriously wounded.

After his unit was released in February 2024, Chanan was home for two-and-a-half months with his family, which now included an additional member: an infant son born during his first round of service. Chanan rejoined his comrades in arms in April 2024 and for six weeks was stationed on a base north of Gaza, defending the nearby Israeli towns. After returning to civilian life for four months, he and his fellow soldiers spent the last quarter of 2024 securing the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza. Three weeks ago, they went back in, this time to a base east of Gaza to protect the nearby kibbutzim; this posting is expected to end in mid-August. Chanan has been in uniform, serving in or near Gaza, for 293 days so far and will cross the 350-day mark this summer, at which point he will have spent more time in the reserves than out since the war began.

The war’s impact on reservists is hardly confined to the time they are in uniform. When it comes to work and to family, their lives as civilians are deeply colored by their absences. Each time Chanan returned to his job after weeks or months of being away, he had to catch up frantically on everything he had missed and go through the painstaking process of reclaiming responsibility for areas he had handed over to others, only to pass them back before returning to the army, without having had a chance to get into a groove of working with his colleagues.

Chanan was fortunate, however, compared to other combat reservists. Although it is forbidden by law to dismiss employees for serving their country, a disturbingly large number of employers have found ways to lay off those frequently absent from work due to reserve duty or to induce them to quit by giving them low-level assignments on the grounds that more interesting tasks require long-term commitments. This is precisely what happened to the husband of E., a student at Shalem now in her third year. (For reasons of privacy, I will use a single initial in citing Shalem students.) He has done more than 250 days of reserve duty and is currently in Gaza; he was effectively forced out of an excellent job he had held before the war.

Committed reservists are rarely hired for new posts since employers, understandably, look for people they can rely on consistently. One of Shalem’s top seniors, N., a commander in a reserve infantry platoon, was a lead candidate recently for a challenging position for which he was exceptionally well-suited. In the final interview, which he conducted in uniform from an army vehicle on an Israeli outpost inside Lebanon, he was asked, seemingly casually, when his current round of service was ending. When he responded “August, or perhaps September” the tone of the conversation changed abruptly, the interviewer sped through the remaining questions, and the next morning N. was informed that “we found someone else for the post.”

Hardest hit have been active reservists who are self-employed or own small businesses. In the first three months of the war, according to a report by the Israel Democracy Institute, there were over 14,000 such people. As the authors dryly observed, “the law does not prevent customers of self-employed workers in reserve duty from finding other, more available suppliers instead, or from not renewing contracts with a supplier who is in reserve duty.” Reservists in this category who held combat positions and were called up repeatedly experienced devastating losses and in many cases were forced to shutter businesses into which they had poured their time, savings, and hopes for years and even decades.

Call-ups take a different sort of toll on younger reservists pursuing their education. Since Israelis enroll in universities after completing mandatory army service, and since the Jewish state is a world leader in the percentage of its citizens who seek a college degree, a large proportion of the reservists have been compelled to take breaks from demanding, full-time programs of study.

Around 30 percent of all Israeli undergraduates were drafted in the first months of the war, the start of the 2023–24 school year was delayed by more than two months, and numerous adaptations were made to try to keep the reservists from falling behind. At Shalem, more than 60 percent of our student body was in uniform in the first phase of the war, and, after the peak period ended, about 40 percent have been rotating in and out of reserves. While they have done their best to keep up with coursework while stationed in war zones, when they returned to campus shortly after being released they have had to go to extraordinary lengths to catch up on what they missed.

Typical of this group is a freshman, V., who during her six years of regular service rose to be a company commander in the IDF’s search-and-rescue unit, which, in addition to performing combat duties in Judea and Samaria, carried out specialized missions in Israel and abroad rescuing people trapped in buildings by bombings, earthquakes, and other disasters. She spent most of the war’s first year as deputy commander of a company of 90 soldiers in a reserve search-and-rescue-unit and then enrolled in Shalem, where she began her studies in mid-October of 2024. Having just completed a three-month stint, she assumed she would have some respite before having to return. Then Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, and she was called early in the semester to serve for another month, this time as her company’s commander, guarding and patrolling sensitive areas of east Jerusalem.

After returning to classes in late November, N. started catching up on her studies, but had to spend much of her time preparing her unit for their next two-and-a-half-month tour, which began in late December. N. came back to Shalem in mid-March, as the period of final exams and papers was coming to a close, and again set to work catching up. While faculty members went above and beyond to help her make up for lost time and, among other things, created alternative assignments and exams for her, she nonetheless devoted great efforts to her studies while recognizing that she would not be able to make up all the learning she had missed. Socially too, she was rejoining a class that had established its culture, groups, and rhythms while she was away, and was doing so essentially as an outsider.

But the greatest cost of extensive reserve duty is on families. Most Israeli reservists are married or in long-term relationships, and the separation and stress that accompany military service wreak havoc on them. E., whose husband had to give up his job, held the rank of captain during her regular service and in the reserves, and after spending the first two months of the war assisting her father in recovering from heart failure—enabling her two brothers to spend that time in combat units—has subsequently logged 140 days of reserve duty.

E.’s husband is a platoon commander in a reserve armor brigade and has done four rounds of combat in Gaza and one on the border with Lebanon. They became engaged in March 2024, when he was between stints on the front, and less than a week later he headed north with his platoon to serve in a dangerous area, which meant he was only able to go home to see his fiancée twice during this round of service. They were married in mid-October of that year, two weeks after he had completed yet another round in Gaza—which meant that E., on top of her extensive reserve duty, did all the wedding planning and also set up their new home. Since they became engaged, they have been apart far more than together.

The situation is even worse in families of reservists with young children. When stationed at the front for lengthy periods, the spouse in the reserves–typically the husband—is absent for substantial portions of his children’s formative years, which takes a toll on the absent parent, the children themselves, and the spouse who must now be a de-facto single parent, living with the constant worry she might receive the dreaded knock on the door informing her that she has become a widow and her children have joined the growing ranks of “IDF orphans.”

A typical case concerns H., a sophomore who is married and has five children, ranging in age from eight years to 21 months. As an officer in a tank unit, he has done four lengthy stints in Gaza, totaling more than 300 days. His wife is a full-time primary-school teacher, and in H.’s absence the burden of childcare has fallen almost exclusively on her. H.’s children think often about war and about death: “My five-year-old is really scared I’m going to die. He has a classmate whose older brother was killed in the war. He has dreams about my dying, and he asks me periodically if I’m going to die. Before I went back for my last round in March of this year, he tried to block the door so that I couldn’t leave.” The youngest child, H. noted, “only wants to be with his mother as he has yet to get accustomed to me since I returned from my recent round a couple of weeks ago.”

While most commanders arrange short leaves for reservists during their long stretches of service, these hiatuses are all-too-often a source of frustration as the heart and mind of the husband-father remain in the war zone, reliving traumatic incidents or thinking about the challenges he will face upon returning. The wives, quite reasonably, expect their husbands to take on some of the household responsibilities that have been so unevenly distributed and the children, especially the younger ones, have great difficulty adjusting to the presence of a parent who has been absent for so long and is about to leave again.

While disruption to work, studies, and family relationships are the principal reasons combat reservists cite when asked about the difficulties of their service, they sometimes speak of other things as well. The fear of death and injury often hovers in the background, and with good reason: more than 200 reservists have been killed since the war began, and far more have suffered life-altering injuries. According to IDF statistics, there have been three moderate or serious injuries to Israeli soldiers for every death in the fighting in Gaza, and many of these include loss of limbs, brain damage, or severely impaired sight or hearing.

Another factor affecting reservists’ ability to report for additional rounds is PTSD. Worldwide, it is typical for 10 to 15 percent of soldiers who have undergone traumatic experiences to develop PTSD. Though Israel is a world leader in preventing and treating this condition, one would expect the numbers of combat soldiers suffering from it to be relatively high in this conflict, as most have lost one or more comrades, seen others severely injured, and in many cases had their own encounters with death. Though most cases of PTSD typically become manageable after a number of months, not all do, and even a soldier who has largely recovered still suffers from occasional episodes and might well be apprehensive, and justifiably so, about risking a recurrence by going back to a war zone.

Finally, though the media have exaggerated the phenomenon, there are combat reservists who are troubled to be sacrificing so much in a war in which they see the government as refusing to make the far-reaching concessions needed to induce Hamas to release the remaining hostages. On the opposite side of the spectrum are reservists who believe the government has prolonged the war by failing to give the IDF the backing to carry out the decisive measures necessary to achieve victory. As one recently wrote: “We reservists are not burning out because of the number of days we are serving. We’re burning out because we’re being asked to risk everything while being prevented from finishing the job.”

Israelis famously do not like to feel like freiers, the Yiddish-derived word for ”suckers”—those who do more than others and receive less. There is a growing sense among reservists that the burden of service is grossly unequal and that they are getting the short end of the stick. The raw numbers certainly support this feeling: there are fewer than 100,000 combat reservists still reporting for duty at this point, around 1 percent of the population, and alongside the regular forces they are shouldering almost the entirety of the frontline military burden. Knowing that one’s neighbors, fellow students, and colleagues are not drafting into the reserves and are advancing in their educations or careers (or studying in yeshiva) is, for many, a source of enormous frustration and resentment.

In particular, there is mounting anger among reservists and many of the members of their families and social circles about the failure of efforts to enlist a significant percentage of haredi men. As Israelis often put it, the latter are not “going under the stretcher”—the army expression for doing your fair share, based on the drills in which groups of soldiers take turns carrying a stretcher bearing one of their colleagues over long distances in difficult conditions. Prior to October 7, there was at least a plausible argument that the IDF did not require the manpower this sector could provide, but that claim is no longer tenable. With few other options available, the government has increased by a year the age through which Israelis remain in the reserves and there are indications it will raise it further. Haredi politicians in the governing coalition have stepped up their efforts to codify into law the arrangements that allow them to keep their constituents out of the IDF, adding fuel to the fire. At present, the issue threatens to bring down the government and there is some chance that, to avert that outcome, the parties in the coalition will reach a compromise that further ensconces exemptions for Haredim.

How Many Reservists Are Reporting for Duty? And What Do the Numbers Mean?

Under these circumstances, it’s no surprise that reservists are reporting for duty in lower numbers than at the beginning of the war. I now turn to the questions of how many really are answering call ups, and what these statistics tell us about the ability of the IDF to continue carrying out its missions. There are two points of reference to consider in answering these questions: the expected rate of response given the circumstances, and what percentage of their optimal force the reserve units need in order to be effective.

The most fundamental fact in assessing the percentage of reservists reporting for duty is that all of them, even during war, are de-facto volunteers. Anyone who chooses not to answer a summons has only to provide his or her commander with a brief explanation of personal circumstances and the story ends there—without threat of punishment or other efforts to enforce the draft order. That is the explicit policy of the commanders of all the reservists with whom I spoke. Despite occasional rumors about tough officers who seek to enforce the mandatory summons, I have yet to find a credible report of such a case. The IDF only seeks to punish reservists for not reporting for duty when they do so as part of a public call to refuse to serve for ideological reasons.

Given that reserve service is voluntary, one should expect a very large drop-off from the rates of 120 percent achieved at the height of anger against Hamas, fear for the safety of the country, and a visceral desire to march into hell itself to bring out the hostages. If a husband believes the burden and stress on his wife threaten her well-being and perhaps their marriage, it’s natural for him to sit out a round of service. If he fears for the psychological health of his children, who could fault him for putting their welfare first? Similarly, most people cannot afford to watch the businesses they built go bankrupt, or lose a good job in a climate in which getting another one is an uphill battle. University students too, having given up three to six years of their lives for regular army service, can hardly be blamed if they don’t want to fall behind by another year due to constant call-ups.

In addition, one should expect that many of the reservists suffering from PTSD will decline to do another round until they are fully recovered. More mundanely, one should not count on additional stints of service from soldiers in their thirties and forties whose backs, knees, and ankles can no longer handle the stress of the weight they carry in a combat zone, and who discover after an intensive round that their bodies are not up to another one. To this should be added the reservists who are tired of carrying a disproportionate share of the burden while many of their fellow citizens are not doing their part—and in the case of the haredi sector, advocating for making that situation permanent.

It is hard to quantify the cumulative impact of these factors, but my own sense is that if two-thirds of reservists are still showing up, that is even more impressive than the huge numbers reporting for duty at the start of the war.

What, then, are the figures from recent months? The army does not provide detailed information on specific units for reasons of security and perhaps to avoid possible embarrassment to brigades in which the figures are low. Knowledgeable observers also are skeptical regarding the overall numbers the army does provide, since its spokesmen might be sugarcoating reality to keep morale high or to deflect criticism that its policies have depressed the number of reservists reporting for duty.

Based on my research, the number of reservists reporting for duty is significantly greater than two-thirds. Many reservists I spoke with reported enlistment rates between 80 and 85 percent in their units. V.’s search-and-rescue-company was at 80 percent in its last round, and my son Chanan’s infantry company is currently at 85 percent. U., a student who belongs to an elite mobility unit that transports soldiers in and out of war zones and helps protect them during especially dangerous missions, said that, of the twenty members of his team, seventeen showed up for the current round. As to the three who were absent, one owns a company that required his presence at a critical juncture; a second was told at the high-tech firm where he works that if he left again for the front he might not have a position to which to return; and the third is staying home to help care for a newborn, but plans to rejoin the unit in a matter of weeks.

D., who has done more than 300 days of reserve duty as a staff sergeant in an infantry platoon, said that 90 percent of his platoon members showed up for the most recent rotation, which ended a short time ago. Those who did not had been asked by their wives to stay home as the latter felt they were reaching a breaking point. N.’s infantry platoon is currently at 93 percent, and the only soldier who didn’t report has a documented case of PTSD. A senior officer I trust in the much larger Yahalom elite engineering unit—responsible for most of the work of destroying Hamas tunnels—said that they have a 90-percent turnout of reservists in their current tour of duty.

In short, I found that response rates in the units where I can verify the data generally fall into the 80-to-90-percent range. There were a few exceptions, however. C., a junior who is deputy commander of an armored company, told me that for their last round of service, which came on the heels of two long stints of duty, only around 70 percent showed up. A friend in an elite unit said his team is currently fielding ten soldiers instead of the eighteen they should have, which is 55 percent.

In many of these cases, the units deployed additional soldiers beyond the numbers reflected here. While these m’supahim—fighters temporarily attached to units other than the ones to which they organically belong—have always existed in the IDF, this war is the first in which they are being used on a large scale to replenish reserve units that would otherwise be operating below full strength. Most are men who, instead of trying to return to work or studies between rounds, join up with another unit that is active. That is, these are reservists who have volunteered for extra reserve duty—something not always reflected in the alarmist statistics typically cited by the media. In many cases, they prefer to defend their country rather than return to civilian jobs that are already disrupted or temporary. Though the m’supahim are sometimes criticized as being less skilled and experienced than the average soldier in the units they are joining, and for undermining the camaraderie and cohesion of units whose members have worked together for many years, there are frequent cases in which they have proved their worth and been asked to join their “temporary” unit on a permanent basis.

The elite team mentioned above that has only ten of its soldiers in the current round has been augmented by three m’supahim, all veterans of outstanding combat brigades who have been accepted by their new comrades—bringing them above 70 percent of full strength. Similarly, V.’s search-and-rescue company exceeded a 100-percent rate of turnout in its last round by adding m’supahim. Nearly half of those she brought in showed sufficient aptitude that they were invited to join the unit on a permanent basis.

The figures I have cited here are, to my mind, even more impressive than the 120-percent response rate in the initial weeks of the war, when the desire to strike back at Hamas and free our hostages was almost universal among Israelis and when no one expected the war to drag on for over 600 days. While focusing on the one-quarter of the glass that is empty generates headlines, the real story is of a reserve army whose combat soldiers have put in more days of service than their counterparts at any time in Israeli history and have continued to report for duty in unexpectedly high numbers.

Outperforming expectations, however, is not the central criterion for assessing the response of reservists to call-ups. In the harsh realities of warfare, what matters is whether the number of soldiers showing up enables units to perform their missions as needed. Addressing this question fully is beyond the scope of this essay, in part because there is so much variance among units. For instance: an armored battalion leading an attack on an area where terrorists have set up ambushes and booby traps needs a higher percentage of its full complement—say, in the range of 75 to 90 percent. By contrast, an infantry battalion deployed on a base near the Lebanese border protecting nearby towns from Hizballah. In the latter case, it’s necessary to carry out a certain number of patrols and man a set of guard posts around the clock. If the unit is only at 65- or 70-percent strength, it can still fulfill its mission, with the understanding that soldiers might have to spend more time on guard or patrol duty, and less sleeping or performing other duties, than they might under normal circumstances. The IDF also has the option of assigning this unit a smaller set of responsibilities and bringing in additional forces, including those not at full strength, so that all areas are covered.

Indeed, the IDF has quietly begun adapting the missions it gives reserve units to the number of soldiers they are able to field. At present, the five divisions deployed in Gaza are made up predominantly of regular troops, and their units typically are at or near full force. Most reserve brigades that were called up have replaced these divisions on the borders with Lebanon, Syria, or Gaza, or have deployed inside the West Bank, where combat is less intensive. This system enables younger conscripts, in units operating at full strength, to deploy against Hamas without endangering the residents of the areas they were leaving.

Though one could see it as problematic that turnout is in some cases insufficient for reservist units to take on the heavy lifting of fighting terrorists in Gaza for lengthy periods, I view it as a sign of the wisdom of the IDF’s senior commanders, who recognize that this war is a marathon and not a sprint. Rather than wearing down reservists by pushing more of them to show up or by pressing the reduced numbers who do report for duty to put in excessive hours—running the risk they will burn out and not show up next time—the IDF is using them in a manner that conserves their strength, commitment, and fighting spirit. While the reservists have played the full range of crucial roles during this war, the current situation reflects a reversal of the traditional strategy of “the standing army blocks the enemy and the reservists achieve decisive victory.” For the moment, at least, the reservists are mostly holding off the enemy by guarding the frontiers, and the standing army is fighting to achieve a decisive victory.

It is of course possible that the need to deploy the reserves this way at this stage results from a strategic miscalculation. This possibility was raised by the Times of Israel’s Lazar Berman in one of the more astute articles on the subject. He noted that Israel moved slowly at many phases of the war, attacking in one area at a time due to limited intelligence, the need to prepare its ground forces for a conflict unlike any it had fought, diplomatic constraints, and caution born of a desire to protect soldiers’ lives. Though each decision was defensible in its own right, one could imagine the IDF of Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon attacking rapidly in multiple areas of Gaza at once, seeking to score the sort of swift victory reminiscent of its achievements in the Six-Day War or the Yom Kippur War. Instead, Israel adopted a strategy that depended on a large number of reservists serving for extensive periods of time.

I don’t consider myself sufficiently expert on military affairs to weigh in on whether Israel made a strategic mistake in its plan for attacking Gaza, and in any event much of the information needed for a well-grounded conclusion remains classified. Perhaps bungling by the IDF brass or their civilian masters prolonged the war; or perhaps there was no real alternative that would have demanded less of the reservists while attaining Israel’s war aims.

What is worth focusing on is the question of why reservists have continued to show up, round after round. Why have the doomsayers proved so wrong?

Why Do They Keep Coming Back?

Every reservist with whom I have spoken reported for duty on October 7 without a moment’s hesitation. That initial sense of duty, buttressed by the support of all sectors of Israeli society, carried them through the first round of service, which typically ran for three or four months, and often through a second round that began after a break of several weeks. At that stage, the war with Hamas was still in full gear, Hizballah posed an enormous threat to Israelis throughout the country, and the widespread sentiment was that we were still in an “all-hands-on-deck” situation. Since late 2024, however, the conflict feels less existential, Hizballah has been severely weakened, the fight with Hamas has been less intense most of the time, the government’s conduct of the war has grown increasingly unpopular, and appreciation in Israeli society for reservists has diminished appreciably.

Deciding to show up for rounds three, four, and beyond has required more careful consideration and the reservists who have continued doing so have a clear sense of their motivations. While these differ from person to person, four key elements emerged from my conversations that explain why these men and women keep showing up. To illuminate these reasons, I will let the reservists speak in their own voices as much as possible.

They do so for their country. C., deputy commander of a tank company, said, “I feel that I have to be part of this great story of Israel, which is connected to the core of my identity.” For S., a commander in a reserve infantry unit: “You would have to explain to me why I didn’t have to show up. I’m part of the Jewish people and I believe in the Jewish people. I couldn’t stay home in these circumstances.” To U., a fighter in a mobility unit, “There’s a sense that we’re doing something of historical significance. Hamas is not yet destroyed and my fellow soldiers and I want to help destroy it; the hostages aren’t yet home and they have to be brought back.” V. explained that when she shows up for a new round, she sees herself taking part in a conflict that is still existential: “This is our country and if we don’t defend it, no one will do so in our place. It could disappear, be destroyed. So many people want to destroy our country.”

They do so for their comrades. U. has been with the same twenty teammates for the better part of eighteen months. After what they have been through together, he cannot see himself leaving them now. When he has moments of doubt, as happened when he was in the U.S. about to sign a breakthrough agreement on behalf of an educational initiative he had launched, he asks himself: “The team is there, and I’m going to sit here?” He dropped the deal and flew back to join his unit. Y., an operations officer in an armored battalion that has deployed in Gaza and on the border with Lebanon and Syria, has a similar response: “If I don’t report for reserve duty, each of them will have more to do. They’ll be carrying out shifts constantly, and those who are parents will rarely be given a leave to go home and see their children.” For V., the response was visceral, since “the company became my family and the moment it’s your family, you have to be there for your family.”

They do so because they believe they have something special to contribute.  An especially poignant case is that of P., who performed his conscript service of two years and eight months as a commander in a storied IDF infantry brigade despite having suffered a severe ankle injury that frequently left him in pain. When he asked to extend his time in the army, he had to undergo a thorough medical test and was ruled ineligible for combat roles—but stayed on in the IDF to train combat soldiers. On October 7, he decided the country needed fighters and he could endure the pain—just as he had in the past. With help from a couple of former commanders willing to bend the rules, he joined a unit entering Gaza that specialized in evacuating wounded soldiers under fire. He has been one of its squad commanders ever since, having served for nearly 200 days. “I knew this day would come,” P. told me, “and this is what I had trained for. Once you learn to be a fighter, you remain one, and since Israel needs combat soldiers now and I have the ability to be one, it is what I have chosen to do.”

In his regular service, O. was a platoon commander in combat engineering, served as an officer in the reserves, and now plays a key role in the “situation room” of an infantry brigade, where crucial decisions are made. Most of his comrades are conscripts and he feels his background as an officer in a variety of positions in regular and reserve units, along with the experience he has gained in the situation room, gives him a broader, strategic perspective on the engineering corps and the brigade’s operations. “Coupled with the life experience I have gained since my regular service, these enable me to contribute something important that helps the brigade function more effectively.”

H., the father of five who is commander of a reserve armor platoon, is modest and soft-spoken, but believes he has skills, experience, and a temperament that make him well-suited for his role. His aim is to lead his men so that they are maximally effective in carrying out their missions, but without taking unnecessary risks. While recognizing that fortune plays a role in determining who gets hurt in wartime, he is proud that “in my platoon and in the company of which we are a part, no soldiers have been injured or killed.”

They do it for those whose lives have been devastated by this war. P., who has reported for round after round despite the pain of an injured ankle, fights for the sake of comrades who had fallen. “My former commander, Chen Buchris, who was the deputy commander of Maglan [an elite unit], fell in battle fighting terrorists in Nahal Oz on October 7. I wanted his values to go on and I thought about what he would have done in my situation. What I have done is the minimum that Chen would have done.”

For Y., the operations officer, a crucial reason to continue reporting for duty is the hostages still in Gaza. “As long as they remain in tunnels, suffering, as they have been for more than 600 days, the least I can do is to show up and perform my service.”

There is one other factor that is easily overlooked, but critical. Reservists continue to show up because the leadership of the army, from platoon sergeants through brigade commanders, has wisely been flexible in trying to accommodate the civilian lives of those under their command. If a soldier needs to report a few days late, end early, or take a long break in the middle of a rotation because of pressing family or work matters, every effort is made to accommodate him or her. Similarly, most combat units allow periodic leaves in the middle of stints, on a rotating basis, for longer than what army protocol dictates—for instance, giving the soldiers four out of every fourteen days off. To make this work, those soldiers not on break take extra shifts, a sacrifice they readily accept since it means that they too will benefit from longer stretches at home.

Similarly, combat soldiers often take the initiative to find ways to recharge their batteries in the midst of the combined tension and monotony that often characterize a war zone. S., a commander in a reserve infantry platoon, organized TED-style talks given on a rotating basis by him and his comrades, who play a wide variety of roles in civilian life. The 24 soldiers in his platoon heard a banker, a specialist in fraud prevention, a philosophy student, a fundraiser, and a start-up entrepreneur, among others, share insights from their respective fields of expertise. At a time when they were carrying out especially repetitive guarding duties, S. explained, “we could have gone crazy from boredom. Instead, each evening we would have two TED lectures, followed by Q. and A.” The result, as he explained it, is that “for a moment, you’re not a soldier, and this was terrific for morale.”

This combination of internal motivation, decentralized decision making, and initiative by the soldiers all reflect the kind of informality and flexibility that typifies the IDF and makes it unlike other militaries. Thanks to the wisdom of officers in employing their discretion, what outsiders might see as laxity has in fact helped ensure the robust turnouts in most reserve units.

How to Sustain the Reserves’ Success

So far, predictions of a radical drop in reservist turnout rates have not materialized and there are few signs the system is on the verge of collapse, despite the febrile predictions often trumpeted in the media. Even so, there are reasons for concern as the burdens borne by reservists are indeed great, their cumulative effect increases over time, and there is always a danger that a critical mass of the soldiers who have been ”under the stretcher” will decide it is time to step away and reclaim their civilian lives.

Such an outcome would be a disaster, and it is crucial to do whatever possible to prevent it. This is not the place for a comprehensive program of action, but I would like to offer three suggestions that would go a long way to sustain the reservists.

First, and most important, we should express to the reservists our gratitude and that of the nation for all they have done and are continuing to do—clearly and frequently, publicly and privately. We can take as a model Winston Churchill’s August 1940 address to the House of Commons, at a time when the German air force was engaged in a brutal campaign of bombing runs aimed at pulverizing the British people into submission. England, almost alone in resisting the Nazis, had sent its pilots to defend their island home by engaging the attackers in the skies. While the outcome of this epic clash was still uncertain, Churchill declared:

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world . . . goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

With appropriate adaptations, these words apply to Israel’s combat reservists, to whom so many of us indeed owe so much. While they are thankfully not “so few”—indeed, their numbers, close to 100,000, are a big part of what has enabled them to play a decisive role in the multi-front conflict—they constitute only 1 percent of Israel’s population and therefore are a tiny minority that is carrying an outsized part of the responsibility for our national security. All Israelis, and everyone around the world who supports the Jewish state, owe them very, very much.

In speaking with reservists, I have been struck by their sense that while they remain immersed in the war, having put their lives on hold, most Israelis and their supporters abroad seem to have moved on. The reservists recall sadly that their countrymen were tremendously supportive in the early days of the war, but often seem to take them for granted now. In some instances, they told me, those not serving in the reserves even suggested to them that they are being foolish and should get back to their studies, work, and families. The combat reservists deserve better, and anyone in a position to express gratitude should do so with the humility their commitment ought to engender. All Israel ought to feel pride in belonging to a nation that has produced such fine citizens.

While the clear and consistent expression of genuine gratitude is the single most important step, it is also crucial to avoid the single action most likely to lead to a dangerous drop in the number of combat reservists reporting for duty: accepting demands from haredi parties that the Knesset enshrine in law the current practice exempting the vast bulk of their community from taking a turn under the stretcher, while their fellow Jewish (and Druze) citizens are asked to add ever more weight and carry it for ever-greater distances. The war, with its unprecedented demands for combat soldiers, has created a broad consensus in Israeli society that Haredim can no longer push off doing their fair share in defending the country. While the decision to pass a law legitimizing draft-dodging is largely in the hands of politicians, engaged Israeli citizens and supporters of the Jewish state abroad have the ability to make a crucial difference on this vital issue if they weigh in against such a prospect with full force.

There are also tangible steps that civilians can take to assist reservists individually and in groups, and doing what one can in this area is my third suggestion. I have seen the value of this during the past year-and-a-half by being engaged, together with remarkable colleagues in Israel and abroad, in supplying essential, lifesaving equipment to IDF units, especially those of reservists—as it is widely understood that the gear the army gives them is well below the standards of what goes to their peers in the regular army. Helping with these efforts is not only an important gesture of gratitude, and one that can lift morale. It also maximizes the soldiers’ chances of surviving the war sound in body and spirit.

Similarly, it is of paramount importance to provide all possible assistance to the spouses of reservists who are at the front. The unsung heroes of this war, these wives (and more than a few husbands) bear an enormous burden. Those people who live nearby can help with childcare and meals, and those further away can still provide much-needed social and emotional support. Above all, it’s imperative to acknowledge the sacrifice of these women, which keeps Israel safe, and to express to them the gratitude they so richly deserve.

The reservists who stepped forward in Israel’s darkest hour are continuing to go above and beyond, despite all the good reasons they have not to do so. In addition to highlighting their sacrifice and contribution, defending them against claims they are on the verge of collapse, and appreciating the motivations that have led them to act so nobly, we must act decisively to express our profound gratitude to them and their families, and to take the concrete steps that can enable them to continue defending our nation wholeheartedly.

With great love Nancy and Joel Hart dedicate this article to Joel’s mother, Lucille, who is celebrating her 100th birthday.