Israel prepares to call up 450,000 soldiers amid mounting toll on reservists and their families

Yahoo

a day ago

The escalation of Israel's operations in Gaza has brought new upheaval for reservists and their families, as well as renewed resentment about haredi Orthodox Jews who avoid military service.
Tzemach David Schloss has spent 290 days in the IDF reserves over the last 19 months — close to half of the time that has passed since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. He says the hardest part isn't just the danger of combat, but of what he experienced when he first came home.
'I didn't want to get too close to my wife or children because I was scared that any minute I'd be called up again,' he said.
Soon, he was. 'My son was born during the war into my arms at home, and a week later I was back in the rubble of Gaza, where at any given moment you can get shot,' he said.
'I've probably spent more time in uniform than with my baby. That horrifies me,' Schloss added. 'This is a critical stage for bonding. He's been affected by this. I am, too. I feel like my fatherhood has been compromised.'
Schloss says he'll continue to report for duty when ordered. But he voiced deep frustration with what he described as a broken system, one that issues sudden, months-long call-up orders while relying on a shrinking pool of reservists to carry the load.
He is not alone. The global discourse about the war has focused on starvation and death in Gaza — concerns that have begun permeating Israeli discussions as well. But chief among Israelis' concerns, along with the suffering of the hostages held by Hamas, are the welfare of their husbands, fathers and sons off fighting, and sometimes dying, at the front. Now, the escalation of Israel's operations in Gaza has brought new upheaval for reservists and their families, as well as renewed resentment about haredi Orthodox Jews who avoid military service.
On Monday, the Israeli government authorized calling up as many as 450,000 reservists over the next three months — more than were called up on Oct. 7, 2023, and the most at any time in Israel's history. When the first call-ups in support of an expanded offensive in Gaza went out last month — despite a decision made in November to cap reserve duty in 2025 at two and a half months — it was the seventh time being called up since Oct. 7 for some.
'I am aware of the weight of the mission, the responsibility, and the burden we place on you and your families,' Eyal Zamir, the military's chief of staff, told reservists after the orders went out. 'When we call you up, we do so with utmost reverence.'
There are roughly 100,000 active-duty soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, those in their mandatory conscription period — which lawmakers have extended during the war. After Oct. 7, the IDF called up nearly 300,000 reservists, who have served in multiple stints totalling 136 days per year on average.
While the IDF experienced an unprecedented 120% turnout rate for reservists on Oct. 7, current participation is less than half that, according to Zamir's office. The decline stems from exhaustion and economic hardship after months of repeated call-ups, anger over haredi draft exemptions, and a loss of trust in the government, especially as officials have said returning the remaining 58 hostages is not the war's top goal.
Signs of a crisis are mounting: Last week, a Knesset committee voted to extend the government's right to call up reservists, over the objection of opposition lawmakers who said the government should do more to conscript haredi soldiers before pressing others back into service. In recent days, two reservists in an advocacy group called Soldiers for Hostages — one who spent 110 days in uniform since Oct. 7, another who had reported for 270 days of duty — were sentenced to military prison for refusing to serve in what one called 'a never-ending war.' And a report found that reservists are being called up despite mental health issues that should make them ineligible for service.
According to data released in March by the Defense Ministry, an outsized portion of the wounded since the war began — 66% — are reservists, approximately half of whom are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Ministry officials are anticipating that number to rise significantly as more cases are diagnosed.
Tal Zalcman is one of the reservists who has newly reported for duty. Immediately after Oct. 7, his Air Force squadron was deployed to Israel's northern border. The site where he was first posted was struck by Hezbollah rockets. Soon, he found himself feeling anxious and depressed – a departure from his positive mental state before Oct. 7.
'Everyone around me was so shaken, but I just shut off,' he recalled. 'I stopped thinking about anything that went beyond the next technical task of guard duty, patrols, coordination.'
After being released from his first stint in the reserves, Zalcman returned to his teaching job at a high school in Ramat Gan — a decision he now says was a mistake, given the acute mental state he was in at the time, with the onset of panic attacks for the first time in his life. After finishing the year, he realized he needed to make a change. When the school year began in 2024, he was not in the classroom.
His experience was not unique. A survey by Israel's national employment service released in March found that 41% of reservists who served after Oct. 7 said they had been fired or otherwise left their jobs after returning to civilian life.
The frequent churn of workers has strained workplaces and the economy, with watchdogs warning that the expansion of the war could unleash severe economic damage. The back-and-forth has also affected the many reservists who are university students, interrupting their studies and potentially setting them back.
Eitan Shamir, former head of the national security doctrine department at Israel's Strategic Affairs ministry, now directs the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He said faculty and administrators had begun recording lectures and softened attendance policies to account for students who were called into service.
'Every lecturer takes personal responsibility to ease the burden on reservists,' he said. But he noted that while digital tools have improved access across many departments, some fields — such as medicine and engineering, where in-person training is a must — have been hit especially hard, with students falling behind in ways that may be almost impossible to recover from.
As for Zalcman, leaving the classroom did not ease his depression, which worsened over time. He moved to a therapy farm in the central Israeli community of Nir Tzvi, then, at the urging of friends, traveled to Thailand. A few months later, he found himself in Koh Phangan, at a retreat called David's Circle, a loosely structured healing space frequented by reservists and survivors of the Nova music festival. The island, known for its mix of hedonism and healing, offered a cocktail of ice baths, psychedelic ceremonies, and easy access to recreational drugs.
Still searching for relief, Zalcman, who had already trained as a yoga teacher, enrolled in a monk ordination program at a Buddhist monastery. But after being forced to shave his head, relinquish his tefillin, and bow before the Buddha and the senior monk, something in him broke.
'Everyone around me seemed happy, but I felt like I was in a cult,' he said. He left the program halfway through.
Since returning to Israel Zalcman began planning what he hopes will be a first-of-its-kind retreat center: a men-only space for current and former reservists, offering overnight lodging and a program focused on yoga, meditation, and other forms of alternative healing.
'There are only two options for how you come out of this,' he said, referring to reservist service in wartime. 'Either you're in trauma or post-trauma and are therefore in treatment, or you're the one administering the treatment.'
But first, he is in Gaza as one of tens of thousands of soldiers flowing into the enclave to fight in Israel's expanded offensive. 'In part, I returned to Israel for the reserves,' he said. 'You go because they call, because it's your duty.'
For Schloss, too, there is no question about whether he will report for his reserve duties, even though he has a growing family and some others are declining to return to service over time.
'There's a fine line between fighting for a normal life and encouraging people not to show up,' he said. 'We can't afford to cross it.'
But those who do not serve weigh on his mind. For him and many other Israelis, the latest call-ups have underscored how unfair it is that haredi Orthodox Jews are not required to serve.
Last year, amid intensifying tensions over who serves, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that the haredi draft exemption in place for decades was illegal. Tens of thousands of haredi young men have been called up, but only a small fraction have reported to induction centers and others have joined street protests against conscription.
Those who have dodged the draft are subject to penalties, though the military's strained resources, coming alongside Netanyahu's close alliance with haredi political parties, have meant that few have been prosecuted. Still, the issue may end up collapsing Netanyahu's coalition: Haredi politicians have demanded progress on a law formalizing the draft exemption by the holiday of Shavuot, which begins Sunday evening. Otherwise, they have threatened to leave the government, which could deprive the prime minister of a majority.
For Schloss, who describes himself as right-wing ideologically but not a supporter of the current government, the crisis around haredi enlistment is particularly painful given the upheaval in his own life.
'If the threat is so enormous that you have no choice but to draft someone for 100 days with a week's notice, then it's time to take other steps,' Schloss said. 'One step would be to stop funding haredi institutions altogether. To cut 100 million [shekels], or even 400 million. That's not ethical? Or it's undemocratic? Maybe. But so is tearing people from their lives for 100 days.'
Shamir noted that the current war — a prolonged, multi-front conflict involving non-state actors, regional powers, and global superpowers — is fundamentally different in character than all those that preceded it. Unlike the short, decisive campaigns of the past, he said, this is a war of attrition that tests the stamina of both the military and the civilian population.
'It demands long-term resilience and endurance from the home front, not just from those serving on the front lines,' he said.
Many of the reservists are married, with young children. Reservists' wives have emerged as a political constituency in the war, successfully advocating for a 9 billion shekel (roughly $2.5 billion) pot of government funds for the families of deployed soldiers and for policies to otherwise support them. A year ago, under pressure from the constituency, the Knesset passed a law barring employers from firing or placing on unpaid leave the spouses of active-duty reservists, blunting one trauma that had played out for some families since the war's start.
But many other challenges have remained. A recent survey by the Reservists' Wives Forum, which began as an informal Facebook group early in the war and now employs dozens of attorneys working on behalf of families, found that more than half of women with deployed husbands had to cut back on working to compensate for their husbands' absences despite the protections. In the Facebook group, wives share stories of domestic violence, traumatized children, depressed husbands and financial crises.
Last fall, a different survey by the organization, which now advocates for the conscription of haredi Israelis, found that virtually all reservists' wives said their husbands' service had induced emotional harm — 37% to 'a very great degree.'
'The emotional part is the hardest and unfortunately, this is also the hardest thing for decision-makers to understand,' Sapir Bluzer, one of the group's co-founders, said on the 'Israel Story' podcast last year. 'It's much easier to explain to a person like … someone who works in the Treasury Office how it affects our career, than how it affects emotionally our families.'
Kaley Halperin, an American-Israeli musician living in Jaffa, is one of the hundreds of thousands of Israeli women whose husbands reported for service on Oct. 7. She spent the first months of the war raising her four children alone while her husband Yoni, a commanding officer in the paratroopers, was deployed to Gaza. Since then, he has spent more than 200 days in the reserves, inducing turmoil in his work in the tech sector and at home.
In an interview in November 2023, Halperin recalled that during the early days of his service, Yoni didn't want to see his family — even when it was permitted — because, despite missing them deeply, he feared it would weaken his resolve.
'He said he was working on hardening his heart,' she said at the time. 'I told him, 'This war is for peace. You have to remember that.''
A year and a half later, Halperin said she's come to understand how unsustainable that kind of emotional detachment really is.
'Some people go into this with a deep sense of mission — of serving their team, their country, of doing something bigger than themselves,' she said. 'But over time, that can blur into something else. It can make it easier to dehumanize the other side. I believe there has to be a space between committing war crimes and being killed. I pray we're still in that space.'
The strain of prolonged service seeped into her marriage, exposing differences in parenting styles and worldviews. 'Like in many families, it surfaced things that were already simmering,' she said. The couple decided to separate.
Yoni has been called back into the reserves for another stint starting in July. He hasn't fully decided whether to report for duty.
'I feel I've paid too high a price. I've lost money and business clients, and also paid a price with my family,' he said. 'And also the mission itself isn't clear to me. I'm not connected to it. I'm not sure what we're doing there, except for dragging our feet. We destroy some houses, we're killing terrorists, it's not clear to me at all.'
He added, 'The combination of all fronts — my business, my home, my family, my personal experiences, my time, and my money — is too much.'