Edelstein urges ‘real solution’ as work set to begin on revising Haredi draft bill

The head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense committee declared Thursday that deliberations on a proposed bill regulating Haredi military enlistment were complete, and that it would now begin drafting a new text of the highly sensitive legislation.

“We have completed the discussions phase” and that the committee’s legal staff will now begin drafting an updated version of the legislation,” Yuli Edelstein told lawmakers following a lengthy and contentious meeting, emphasizing that “we need a real solution, and I very much hope that we will be able to bring one.”

The coalition’s two Haredi parties have placed great pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pass the controversial legislation, which they hope will be used to reestablish military service exemptions for yeshiva students that were nixed last year by the High Court. Failure to do so could risk the continued existence of Netanyahu’s government. 

For his part, Edelstein, a Likud MK, has pledged that any law that makes its way out of his committee must “significantly increase the IDF’s conscription base.”

This has proven unacceptable to the Haredim, with United Torah Judaism (UTJ) MK Yaakov Asher stating earlier this week that if the Knesset did not pass draft exemption legislation by the end of the summer session, July 27, his party would no longer be able to remain in the government.

Both UTJ and fellow ultra-Orthodox party Shas this week boycotted votes on coalition legislation to protest the lack of an exemption bill.

Thursday’s hearing largely focused on ensuring that any large influx of ultra-Orthodox soldiers — who refuse to serve in mixed units and fear that insufficient care for their needs will harm their lifestyle and secularize them — does not negatively affect the rights of female troops.

Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, head of the IDF Personnel Directorate’s Planning and Personnel Management Division, told lawmakers that the number of women serving in combat roles has increased significantly in recent years, rising from 500 to 4,500 over the past decade.

The number of women serving in the reserves has also increased significantly, he said — noting that while women comprised only three percent of reservists during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, this increased to 8% during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and to 20% during the current war.

According to Tayeb, while not all combat roles are yet open to women, the army has made “unprecedented” efforts to integrate women, including religious ones, into combat units.

Orthodox women are exempt from military service, with many in the religious Zionist community choosing to volunteer for national service instead. However, their numbers are growing, and one unit for religious female fighters has already been established, with more on the way, Tayeb said.

Challenged by Democrats MK Efrat Rayten as to why women’s organizations were not invited to meet with the senior IDF brass to discuss Haredi enlistment, Tayeb replied that “women are not a target population in the process,” prompting harsh criticism from the Israel Women’s Network.

“In other words, female soldiers, who are excluded and harmed by the demands for sterile spaces without women, are not even counted at the planning table,” the group tweeted.

Turning to the issue of enforcement operations against draft dodgers, Tayeb said that the IDF has three main enforcement mechanisms: stopping people at Ben Gurion Airport, random police checks, and dedicated operations against evaders.

Such operations have been limited over the last year-and-a-half as the bulk of the military police’s resources have been tied up in imprisoning captured terrorists, he stated.

Overall, since the beginning of the year, 340 Israelis who received military draft orders and dodged service were detained while trying to leave the country — 52 of whom had recently received orders as part of an effort to recruit ultra-Orthodox men. Of those who were detained, 23 have since been drafted to the IDF, he said.

Pushed by lawmakers, Tayeb denied that the IDF engages in any selective enforcement or treats secular and ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers differently, arguing that decisions about arrests are “not related to whether he’s Haredi or not, it’s related to the fact that he’s an evader.”

“We’re not checking right now whether he’s Haredi or not Haredi,” he said.

Currently, approximately 80,000 Haredi men between the ages of 18 and 24 are eligible for military service and have not enlisted. The IDF has sent out 18,915 initial draft orders to members of the Haredi community in several waves since July 2024, but, as of late April, only 232 of those who have received orders have enlisted — 57 of them in combat roles.

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