From the point of view of the Israel Defense Forces, Captain Omer Patziniach was discharged from her duty as a reservist last month.

But as Patziniach, a 27-year-old officer who coordinates artillery fire with ground forces, sees it, her military service continues. She’s one of several dozen reservists camped out near the Knesset in Jerusalem to protest what they consider a failure by the political leadership to fight Hamas in Gaza effectively in the war that began on October 7.

“I’m in civvies but I’m on personal reserve duty, fighting to win this war,” Patziniach told The Times of Israel last week in what she and fellow activists call the Reservists Tent.

The protest action, whose leaders demand a firmer hand against Hamas and permanent occupation of some land in Gaza, reflects growing frustration on the Israeli right with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet’s perceived failure to deliver on the initial stated goal for the war: dismantling the Hamas terror group and toppling the regime that it has built since its 2007 takeover of Gaza.

“We’re being fed a narrative of victory but on the ground, it’s not getting done, there’s a strategy of non-victory,” Patziniach complained.

She and the reservists fear that Israel’s very survival is at stake. “If we fail to destroy Hamas, if this is just another round [of fighting], after the mini-Holocaust that was perpetrated on our soil, then we’re sealing our fate as an entity that cannot defend itself and folds in the face of the enemies around us. This is existential,” she said.

Failure to topple Hamas after declaring it a war objective “is worse than not having declared it at all,” argued Az Efroni, a reservist from Ein Yahav, a Negev moshav situated near the border with Jordan. “If you don’t declare it, at least you keep the other side guessing what price you’ll exact. Not delivering is showing yourself to be impotent.”

Patziniach, who served in both the southern and northern theaters recently, sees Israel’s restrained response to Hezbollah on the northern border as “bunker warfare.”

“There’s hardly any shooting from our side,” she said. “Reduce casualties. Wait it out. Don’t stick your neck out. Remain in the sheltered area. Radio headquarters. Keep your head down.”

In the south, “the troops are taking a day to hold 500 meters. We’ve been there three months and we still don’t control the territory,” Patziniach said, her military expressions contrasting with her new-age appearance, complete with nose ring, multiple earrings, and a thick wooly raincoat.

Since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip over 15 years ago, the terror group’s conflict with Israel had been characterized by low-intensity warfare and periods of relative calm, punctuated by rounds of violence involving heavy rocket fire into Israel and retaliatory IDF strikes in Gaza.

Between 2008 and 2021, Israel and Gaza underwent four major combat operations, including two incursions, and dozens of more short-lived explosions of cross-border fire from Gaza, a situation that many, especially hawks residents of the south, saw as untenable and requiring a major strategic shift — though not all agreed on whether the answer was massive military action or a long-term detente.

That dynamic changed on October 7, when Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel, murdered some 1,200 people and abducted over 250 others, about half of whom are still being held in Gaza.

Israel invaded Gaza, killing thousands of gunmen and vowing to dismantle Hamas, and for many, the idea of a long-term detente with Hamas went out the window.

But for Patziniach and others in the tent, the long-awaited chance for a game-changing military operation is being squandered, despite a post-attack atmosphere of unity that would have given the government wide backing for such a move.

“The work is incomplete. So we’re staying here till it gets done,” she said.

The 132 remaining hostages present a military challenge to the IDF, potentially complicating its use of artillery, airstrikes and other explosives in targeting Hamas’s vast tunnel network, where the terror group is believed to keep captives.

Some relatives of the hostages and other demonstrators have backed calls for a ceasefire, arguing that Israel should prioritize seeking a deal for their freedom and avoid fighting that endangers them.

Patziniach allowed that the hostages “create some tactical difficulties but are not the reason for the absence of effective military action” by the IDF in Gaza.

Israel’s leaders, who claim that military pressure bolsters Israel’s position in hostage talks, have vowed to keep up the fight and rejected claims that a shift to low-intensity fighting constitutes a retreat from its goals.

But humanitarian woes and a mounting Palestinian death toll — unverified Hamas figures put the number of dead at over 25,000, though the tally includes an unspecified number of combatants — have led to heavy international pressure, seemingly limiting the scale of the fighting.

Those at the tent harbor deep anxiety over what they view as a slow defeat that Israel cannot afford.

“Every terrorist group and cell is watching and plotting as they see our slow-motion trainwreck, adhering to the same patterns and wrong priorities,” said Efroni, a 55-year-old father of three.

He cited orders handed down from top brass to troops in Gaza demanding they erase graffiti that soldiers had left on Gaza buildings, some of it vowing a reestablishment of Israeli settlements in the Strip.

“You have generals worrying about graffiti. It just tells you all you need to know about their seriousness about winning,” said the self-described political hawk, who was toting an M16 assault rifle while wearing a civilian top and IDF-issue pants, a common choice among Israel’s notoriously raggedy-looking reservists.

Patziniach insisted that the Reservists Tent is nonpartisan with some frequenters who are dyed-in-the-wool leftists, though she concedes that most – “probably 60 percent” — are right-wing.

As she spoke, new arrivals reported for duty: A man in his late seventies named Shlomo, a regular at the tent, saluted her ceremoniously, drawing laughs from several reservists standing around.

Several hundred people pass by the tent daily and thousands have visited, regulars say.

Two right-wing supporters, Shmulik and Pnina Maslati, came from their moshav Moreshet in the Galilee to show their support and donate money to the cause, in a fund Patziniach set up earlier this month along with Gilad Ach, founder of the hawkish Ad Kan watchdog. They’d heard about the Reservists Tent on Channel 14, a conservative outlet that has remained largely supportive of Netanyahu.

Others hawks are protesting too, aiming fire at Netanyahu over his management of the war. On the Tze’elim military base in southern Israel on Monday, reservists attached banners to military Hummers reading: “We, too, were discharged without achieving victory.”

On January 17, Moshe Feiglin, a right-wing hardliner, held the first major political rally on the right since October 7, in which he told hundreds of participants that Netanyahu’s war strategy in Gaza was fundamentally flawed because it seeks neither to depopulate the Gaza Strip of Palestinians nor to return Jewish settlers.

“The current leadership won’t allow itself to win in Gaza because victory can only mean one thing: Occupation, deportation, and settlement,” Feiglin said. “Any military action that doesn’t achieve those objectives perpetuates our enemies’ position.”

Feiglin, applauded by some 500 people at a Jerusalem movie theater, announced he would run to replace Netanyahu as prime minister in the next elections at the head of the Zehut party, which last ran in 2019 but failed to enter the Knesset.

Netanyahu’s partners on the right have also attacked the premier for what they see as a lily-livered approach to the war.

Public Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right politician who has tried to push Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yaov Gallant into backing a more hawkish stance, protested on social media against the cabinet’s decision to hand over the Palestinian Authority’s tax money. Netanyahu, he said, “constantly retreats from his lines in the sand.”

Attacks on Netanyahu from the other side of the political spectrum have also begun to gain steam, after largely disappearing following the October 7 attack.

On Saturday, hundreds of people demonstrated in Haifa against the war at an event organized by some 40 left-wing groups, which featured accusations that Israel is perpetrating genocide against Palestinians.

In Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Caesarea, thousands demonstrated at rallies that also sounded calls to stop the fighting and make a deal for the hostages.

Most of the protests involved calls to oust Netanyahu, reminiscent of the pre-October 7 groundswell of opposition sparked by the government’s attempts to overhaul the judiciary.

On Monday, those calls came to the Reservists’ Tent doorstep, as dozens of people rallied outside the Knesset for new elections, accusing the government of failing to prioritize the hostages.

“The return of the hostages is not a question, it is the number one obligation of this government. The hostages were abandoned and kidnapped on its watch, and so it has to do everything to return them,” said outgoing Labor party chairwoman Merav Michaeli, who joined the demonstration.

But even as the fight-Hamas versus free-the-hostages debate takes on an increasingly partisan character, Patziniach believes she can keep the Reservists Tent at a safe remove from the looming political storm.

“People try to suck us into the Bibi debate [over his leadership],” she said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. But her group would not take the bait, she insisted. “We demand decisive victory. We don’t care about the rest.”

Charlie Summers contributed to this report.