Has Israel Bitten Off More Than It Can Chew? The Strain of a Seven-Front War

Wars on two fronts are, generally speaking, things that are best avoided. The history books are littered with examples of countries and empires that thought they could pull them off — either by choice or by necessity — and with a few exceptions, they did not end well.

Israel, for its part, has been running something close to an on-again, off-again war across some seven separate fronts for going on two and a half years now. And while the Israeli Defense Forces are certainly still punching way above their weight in terms of sheer capabilities and reach for such a tiny country, cracks are starting to show.

Curiously, though, the problems threatening to split things wide open are not just coming from across the border. The strain of Israel’s fractious internal politics is also starting to show — and it may prove the more dangerous of the two.

Key Takeaways

Israel has waged near-continuous operations across roughly seven fronts — Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, and a base in Iraq — for about two and a half years, with a population of just 10 million people.
The IDF reports it is 12,000 troops short of where it needs to be, with roughly 9,000 gaps in combat roles; Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warned the army could “collapse in on itself,” while reserve call-up turnout dropped from 130 percent after October 7th to just 60–70 percent by September.
Hardware is also strained: Israel reportedly went “critically low” on ballistic missile interceptors during its war with Iran, with one think tank estimating its Arrow inventory could be fully exhausted at Tehran’s firing rates.
The decades-old Haredi military exemption — once covering just 400 students — now applies to roughly 14 percent of the Israeli population; a 2024 Supreme Court ruling striking it down triggered a coalition collapse, with United Torah Judaism and Shas both quitting and forcing new elections.
IDF commanders told Netanyahu that 80 percent of violent incidents in the West Bank are Jewish extremist attacks on Palestinians, and that diverting resources to counter Jewish terrorism has forced the army to cut back on arresting Palestinian suspects.

The thesis is simple: Israel’s military model was never built to fight long wars on many fronts at once, and the same conflicts that are exhausting its army are now tearing apart the coalition meant to govern it.

Running Hot

Over the past two and a half years, it has been tricky to keep up with all the different operations Israel has been involved in. The headlines have, of course, focused on the massive war in Gaza — where over a hundred thousand troops have rotated through at various points, and where Israel still occupies somewhere in the vicinity of half of the enclave. But beyond that there has been Lebanon, the war with Iran, ongoing operations in the West Bank, and periodic strikes into Syria and Yemen. They also set up shop in Iraq.

Throughout all of this, Israel has seemed able to take on these multiple fronts — sometimes one after another, sometimes several at once — without buckling. Lately, though, it has started to look like this tiny country might be maxing out. Israel, after all, has just some 10 million people. For context, that is less than the population of Greater London.

Even by Israeli standards, these last years have been unprecedented. Some 360,000 reservists were called up in the first weeks after October 7th, the largest mobilization since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Since then, the reserve army has never really stood down — not in a sustained way, at least. Some 17,000 of the original call-ups have remained on active duty ever since, and tens of thousands more have been sent home only to be called back up as many as seven times.

A Model Built for Short Wars

The IDF was, to put it simply, not designed to fight like this. The whole operating logic, dating back to the 1950s, was that the country was too small to really sustain a long-term war, so it would have to fight short ones with overwhelming force, helped in part by a nationwide citizen army. Jerusalem used that model for most conflicts since, and it largely worked. There were occasional longer-term stints, like the occupation of Lebanon, but even there a massive invasion rapidly diminished down to an occupation by just a few thousand.

What is notable about the current era is not just that the wars are lasting longer than expected. It is that these longer wars are coming atop a genuine manpower shortage. The IDF says it is currently 12,000 troops short of where it needs to be, with roughly 9,000 of those gaps in combat roles. And the way the army has been plugging that hole — by grinding the reserve force harder and harder — is itself becoming part of the problem.

Reserve duty for the average combat soldier in 2026 was originally supposed to be 55 days, already a serious ask for people holding down jobs and raising families. The Iran war, though, raised that to 80 to 100 days for many units. At those rates, Israel is effectively asking its citizen-soldiers to spend a quarter of every year in uniform, with no end in sight.

The Reservists Wear Thin

Watch on WarFronts

Watch the full video analysis on the WarFronts YouTube channel, presented by Simon Whistler.

To an extent, Israelis understand this as a possibility when they enter the reserves. The country is not exactly a stranger to being attacked — and, as a certain Russian president can attest, schedules for a swift, overwhelming blow to knock out your enemy do not always go according to plan. In the aftermath of the October 7th attack, reservists reportedly showed up at 130 percent strength.

People who had not even been called rushed to join, with some units even turning volunteers away because they did not have enough weapons to hand out. It was pretty clear from the outset that Gaza was not going to be a quick battle.

By September last year, though, turnout for operational call-ups had dropped to 60 or 70 percent, and reserve commanders had turned to recruiting through WhatsApp groups because the normal channels were not filling the ranks anymore. The frustration has even spawned its own political vehicle: a new party called the Reservists, led by former minister and reserve battalion commander Yoaz Hendel, running on a platform built entirely around draft reform and reservist welfare.

The manpower question is no longer just a logistical problem inside the army. It has become a political force in its own right, channeling the exhaustion of the people who actually do the fighting into a demand that someone else share the burden.

The Hardware Runs Low

Manpower issues are just part of the picture, though — and the hardware side is likely even more concerning for Jerusalem. Throughout Operation Roaring Lion, the Israeli campaign against Iran earlier this year, a British defense think tank estimated that Israel could fully exhaust its inventory of Arrow interceptors if Tehran kept firing at the rate it was. US officials similarly told Semafor that Israel had informed them it was “critically low” on ballistic missile interceptors.

Israel is not exactly alone here. Interceptor shortages have become a running concern the world over in recent months, and the US is similarly reported to be dangerously low itself. One report estimated that Washington burned through 25 percent of its entire THAAD inventory defending Israel’s airspace during the 12-day war in June 2025. But the US has a vastly more robust industrial base it can lean on to build more of these, at a rate that Israel would seriously struggle to match.

The hardware can eventually be rebuilt and restocked. The manpower problem is another story entirely. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir recently warned the security cabinet that the army is going to “collapse in on itself” if the shortage is not addressed — and the reason it has not been is tearing the current government apart.

Who Fights? The Haredi Exemption

Part of Israel’s ability to punch so far above its weight has historically come down to conscription. Basically, when you are born in Israel, it is just taken as a given that you will do your time serving in the IDF after graduating high school. For those who go on to university, you serve first and study later.

There has been one exception to this from the very earliest days of the country. Israel was founded almost exclusively by secular Jews who were nevertheless deeply committed to preserving the religious tradition that, in the wake of the Holocaust, was a shell of its former self. Haredi Jews — the so-called “ultra-Orthodox” — were granted an exemption by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Men deep in religious scholarship in yeshivas across the country, who did not want to cut their studies short to serve, would be exempt.

At the time, this covered all of 400 or so students — not exactly something that was going to be a game-changer for the country militarily, so it was not particularly controversial. The thing is, population trends fluctuate. And when it comes to the Haredim, those 400 were just the start.

A Demographic Time Bomb

Migration from Europe began to boost their numbers, but the Haredim also have a lot of kids — and we do not mean more than one or two, or even four or five. Right now, they average six and a half children per woman, a figure that is impressive in and of itself until you realize it is actually down from peaks of nearly eight around the turn of the millennium. And remember, that is the average.

Fast forward to 2026, and those military-exempt scholars have grown to roughly 14 percent of the overall Israeli population. That is a lot more significant in terms of military exemptions — but when you start breaking the figures down by age, it really starts sounding alarm bells. Nearly 60 percent of all Haredi Jews are under the age of 20, and they currently make up a quarter of all Jewish children in the country under the age of four.

This has been a long time coming, and successive Israeli governments have largely done what any responsible state would do: they kicked the can down the road. There have been attempts to figure out what to do, most of which involved trying to pass laws that coupled increasing voluntary Haredi integration into the IDF with codification of exemptions. They never really went anywhere, and the issue has become increasingly toxic.

The Court Forces the Issue

Things really came to a head in 2024, when the Israeli Supreme Court finally weighed in and unanimously ruled that there was no legal basis for Haredi exemptions. It ordered the Defense Ministry to begin mandatory conscription and greenlit charging those who did not respond to summons with draft dodging.

The ruling landed on a government that could not have been worse positioned to deal with it. Israel had gone through an unprecedented series of five separate elections in four years between 2019 and 2022, and going back to the voters for a sixth was just out of the question. Netanyahu had entered into an unenthusiastic coalition with some six separate parties, including the two Haredi ones — United Torah Judaism and Shas.

Even with them all together, he barely had a majority, which meant no wiggle room. And when it comes to the Haredi parties, getting their support usually involves one thing: guarantees to continue the military exemption. Netanyahu did try to work with them, but the war made the issue more radioactive than ever before.

The Burden Falls Unevenly

Neither Haredi party is particularly involved in foreign policy, and neither is pushing for any of the campaigns Israel has embarked on. They are historically willing to sit in coalitions with just about anyone, left or right, so long as they get the select issues they prioritize for their communities. But Netanyahu and his other coalition partners are pushing those campaigns — and their wars are at least part of the reason the exemption has become untenable, with pressure now building from both sides at once.

On one side are the security hawks, along with the far-right religious Zionist groups that form the base of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s parties, and whose communities have absorbed a massively disproportionate share of the war’s cost. Despite comprising maybe 10 to 12 percent of Israel’s population, they have accounted for roughly 45 percent of all combat deaths across the entire war, with some periods spiking north of 60 percent at the height of the violence. This is often driven by an intense nationalist sentiment that leads to over-representation in front-line sign-ups. You can imagine how these men feel about Haredi demands for an exemption — made worse by the fact that the very lawmakers they elected are the ones cutting the deals to make it happen.

On the other side, religion can be quite stubborn, and the Haredi parties have categorically refused to back down. As it became clear that Netanyahu was stalling any formal legislation to codify the exemption, United Torah Judaism quit the coalition outright last summer. Netanyahu limped along on a 60-60 tie until this month, when Shas followed suit and moved to dissolve the Knesset. Elections are coming later this year — and the Haredim are only half the problem.

The Friends You Keep

While the Haredi parties have been enjoying their unusually prominent time in the limelight, another faction of Netanyahu’s coalition has been causing international crises since taking office. The two parties are Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit, but they are better known for their respective leaders: Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. These two men are truly unlike anything previously seen in Israeli political leadership, and very much represent a pivot to the hard right. They consider Netanyahu’s Likud party unnecessarily accommodating to Palestinians.

Of the two, Ben-Gvir is the more controversial. He has been making headlines lately after filming himself taunting bound and blindfolded activists detained from an aid flotilla headed for Gaza — a stunt that drew a rare rebuke from the US ambassador and prompted Israel’s own president to publicly condemn him. It also angered huge swathes of Europe, including countries that are usually staunch supporters of Israel.

Neither of these men is working from the backbenches. Smotrich holds the Finance Ministry, which also puts him in charge of large swaths of policy on the West Bank, including settlements. He has wasted little time delivering for the hardliners who back him: construction there has been booming, with more than 51,000 housing units approved since 2022 and 103 entirely new settlements authorized.

And earlier this month, he was prominently calling for Israel to “erase, permanently, the lines distinguishing between Areas A, B, and C” — the zones that recognize the Palestinian Authority’s governance over parts of its territory. In other words, annexation.

The West Bank Flashpoint

The West Bank has been a flashpoint that has received bizarrely little attention. Attacks by Israeli extremist settlers on Palestinians have been an ongoing fact of life there for years. Not all settlers are involved or even supportive, but the violent fringe is large and well-connected enough that treating it as a few bad apples seriously understates the problem.

With Ben-Gvir — himself a settler, with a long history of backing extremist positions — serving as Minister of National Security, it is not difficult to figure out what side he will come down on. In his early days in office, he was known for unironically referring to those who attack Palestinian villages as “sweet boys.”

There have been attacks on all sorts of Palestinian infrastructure, including homes and religiously motivated attacks on mosques and a Christian village, but this year has been particularly brutal. According to ACLED data, settler violence has surged to the highest levels seen since October 2023. The UN documented an average of 5 settler attacks per day across 2025, totaling nearly 1,800 incidents, including non-fatal attacks. And to make matters worse, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din found that 94 percent were closed without any indictment whatsoever.

To be fair, this is far from the only violence in the territory. The Shin Bet recorded 57 significant Palestinian attacks last year — shootings, stabbings, and car-rammings — though that was down sharply from 231 the year prior.

When the Settlers Turn on the Army

The IDF, for their part, are not turning a blind eye toward settler violence — far from it, and that has landed them very much on the settlers’ bad side as well. Last summer there were multiple attacks by settlers on IDF soldiers, including with pepper spray — attacks that even Ben-Gvir called a “red line,” in a rare break from his usual defense of settler actions. Other attacks targeted equipment, burning IDF military vehicles and the surveillance hardware the army uses to maintain security in the area.

In one instance, after torching a mosque in Deir Istiya, the attackers left behind a message — not written in Arabic for the local Palestinians, but in Hebrew for the IDF. It said, among other things, “We are not afraid of Avi Bluth” and “keep on condemning,” referring to the IDF’s Central Command chief, Major General Avi Bluth, who had recently denounced their violence. The taunt was clear: we can sneak in, burn places down, and get out before you even show up — and there is nothing you can do about it, because the man running the police is on our side.

Netanyahu has known this is a growing issue, but he also knows that if he sacks Ben-Gvir, he loses his coalition. So this unhealthy status quo has continued.

The Mirror Image of the Draft Fight

The key word there is “unhealthy.” Earlier this month, Netanyahu was briefed by a senior officer in the IDF’s Central Command, along with the head of Shin Bet, that some 80 percent of violent incidents Israeli troops in the West Bank record are Jewish extremist attacks on Palestinians. That is a staggering statistic in and of itself, but it is only compounded by reporting from Israel’s Kan network, which stated that “the officer informed Netanyahu… that the need to devote resources to Jewish terrorism has forced the Israel Defense Forces to cut back on arresting Palestinian terror suspects, putting the security of the state at risk.”

The message is not subtle. The army’s own commanders are telling the prime minister that one faction of his coalition has become not just a security problem, but apparently the major security problem in the West Bank. This is, effectively, the mirror opposite of the draft fight: the Haredi walked because Netanyahu could no longer shield them, while Smotrich and Ben-Gvir staying is what is causing chaos elsewhere.

Neither arrangement was sustainable, and by all indications, the differences they were able to paper over are now just too vast. Israel will soon hold new elections for the first time since October 7th. While it is a historically terrible wager to bet against Netanyahu’s political survival, it is quite clear that whatever the next Israeli government consists of, it will look a lot different. What that actually means for the people living in Israel, Palestine, and the wider region remains very much up in the air.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many fronts has Israel been fighting on, and why is that historically unusual?

Israel has been running an on-again, off-again war across some seven separate fronts — Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, and a base set up in Iraq — for about two and a half years. The IDF was built in the 1950s on the logic that Israel was too small to sustain long wars and would have to fight short ones with overwhelming force; operating continuously across this many theaters simultaneously represents a fundamental mismatch with that original design.

What is the state of Israel’s manpower and how are reservists holding up?

The IDF reports being 12,000 troops short of where it needs to be, with roughly 9,000 of those gaps in combat roles, and Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warned the security cabinet the army could “collapse in on itself.” After October 7th, reservists turned out at 130 percent strength, but by September last year operational call-up turnout had dropped to 60 or 70 percent, with commanders resorting to recruiting through WhatsApp. Reserve duty originally supposed to be 55 days in 2026 rose to 80 to 100 days for many units during the Iran war.

How serious is Israel’s hardware shortage, particularly for missile defense?

During Operation Roaring Lion against Iran, a British defense think tank estimated Israel could fully exhaust its Arrow interceptor inventory if Tehran kept firing at the same rate, and US officials were told Israel was “critically low” on ballistic missile interceptors. The US itself reportedly burned through 25 percent of its entire THAAD inventory defending Israeli airspace during the 12-day war in June 2025, but the US has a vastly more robust industrial base to replace them; Israel does not.

What is the Haredi exemption and how did it collapse Netanyahu’s coalition?

When Israel was founded, David Ben-Gurion granted ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men in religious study an exemption from military service — at the time covering just about 400 students. Thanks to high birth rates averaging 6.5 children per woman, the Haredim have grown to roughly 14 percent of the population. In 2024 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled there was no legal basis for the exemption and ordered mandatory conscription, forcing Netanyahu’s hand; United Torah Judaism quit the coalition last summer and Shas followed this month, moving to dissolve the Knesset and triggering elections.

What is the crisis between the IDF and Jewish extremist settlers in the West Bank?

IDF commanders briefed Netanyahu that some 80 percent of violent incidents troops record in the West Bank are Jewish extremist attacks on Palestinians, and that the need to devote resources to Jewish terrorism has forced the army to cut back on arresting Palestinian suspects. Settlers have attacked IDF soldiers with pepper spray and burned military vehicles and surveillance equipment; after torching a mosque in Deir Istiya, the attackers left a Hebrew message taunting the Central Command chief, Avi Bluth, by name — a direct challenge to the army’s authority from within Netanyahu’s own coalition.