Attorney general urges conscription of all draft-age Haredim starting this summer
Enlisting yeshiva students is ‘an essential security need,’ says AG’s office, calling for enhanced enforcement and stronger sanctions against evaders
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Calling the enlistment of yeshiva students “an essential security need,” Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara on Tuesday ordered the military to begin sending conscription orders to all draft-age members of the ultra-Orthodox community at the start of the next recruitment cycle in July.
The High Court’s provisional order in April demanding to know why the government has failed to enforce enlistment orders constitutes a “red flag,” the Attorney General’s Office said, arguing that the current scope of Haredi recruitment is “far from meeting the needs of the army.”
In a document summarizing a recent meeting with senior military and civilian officials, the Attorney General’s Office insisted that as long as a new law regulating the status of yeshiva students is not enacted, “from a legal perspective the state is legally obligated to act according to existing law, and to implement the general conscription obligation in an equal and uniform manner in relation to the entire population.”
As such, Baharav-Miara welcomed IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir’s recent instructions to the IDF manpower directorate “to significantly increase the scope of conscription orders for members of the ultra-orthodox public and to increase enforcement against evaders generally.”
Out of some 19,000 Haredim who received initial draft orders since July 2024, only around 319 have actually enlisted, while 2,521 who have ignored multiple draft orders have been sent immediate call-up orders requiring them to show up at an induction center within 48 hours or be declared draft evaders.
Of these, 964 have been declared draft evaders, a number that is expected to rise significantly in the coming weeks, the Attorney General’s Office said.
The consequences of being declared a draft evader include receiving a “no exit order” — being barred from leaving the country. In addition, during any encounter with the police, the draft dodger can be arrested.
While the exact timeline between the draft orders varies, the Attorney General’s Office has called for shortening the period required to declare candidates for military service evaders.
According to the document, just over 2,000 ultra-Orthodox soldiers joined up as of the end of April, and by the end of the current recruitment cycle, 2,500-2,700 ultra-Orthodox recruits are expected to enlist, significantly fewer than the IDF’s goal of 4,800.
An additional 5,100 orders are expected to be sent by the end of the current recruitment cycle.
During a discussion in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week, Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, head of the IDF Personnel Directorate’s Planning and Personnel Management Division, told lawmakers 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 said.
Military officials have acknowledged that in practice, the IDF had not been enforcing the draft orders it was sending out to Haredim.
“We don’t enforce the draft orders for the ultra-Orthodox enough. There is almost no enforcement of them,” an official told reporters earlier this week.
“We don’t want Military Police battalions to storm Bnei Brak, Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit,” the official said, referring to three major ultra-Orthodox cities. “We want to increase enforcement, but it’s difficult for us.”
Despite this, the IDF on Tuesday confirmed that it had launched a “routine” Military Police campaign to detain people who ignored enlistment orders, sparking ultra-Orthodox threats to bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s already shaky government.
However, this may not be enough, according to the Attorney General’s Office, which called on the government to exhaust its use of “existing enforcement tools” but also cautioned that a “comprehensive mobilization of government ministries is required in order to promote, through government and administrative decisions, an up-to-date set of incentives, both positive and negative, to encourage conscription.”
Earlier this year, both Baharav-Miara and Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon appealed to Defense Minister Katz to advance sanctions on draft evaders, arguing that imposing sanctions on individuals is within the government’s purview and would not require the passage of new legislation.
Baharav-Miara’s message to Katz came after a meeting with government officials on the issue, during which representatives of the defense establishment, the Finance Ministry and the Justice Ministry said that personal penalties on draft dodgers, including revoking privileges and increasing administrative and economic sanctions, were critical for boosting military enlistment figures.
In a letter to the Defense Ministry’s legal adviser this March, Limon noted that various ministries have advanced various sanction proposals that would affect a range of areas from housing and business subsidies to property tax discounts.
However, Katz has not responded to the letter, the Attorney General’s Office said on Tuesday.
Under existing laws, it is possible to block draft dodgers from obtaining driver’s licenses, receiving passports, or renewing their state identification cards, Deputy Knesset Speaker Evgeny Sova (Yisrael Beytenu) told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.
“You can do that today, but the state doesn’t do it,” he said. “But you can’t carry on with your life and use state services in a normal and regular way without actually settling this matter.”
Overall, such sanctions “were not enforced” in a comprehensive manner, not only for Haredim, but for all draft dodgers, said Idit Shafran Gittleman, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies.
Speaking with The Times of Israel on Tuesday evening, former IDF chief military defense counsel Col. (res.) Ran Cohen Rochverger stated that the enforcement actions outlined by the Attorney General’s Office constituted “the most significant [advance] since the petition was submitted to the High Court of Justice regarding the enlistment of yeshiva students.”
The bottom line is that “a significant step up in enforcement is required,” he said, agreeing with what he described as Baharav-Miara’s criticism of the “inadequate manner in which the IDF and other authorities have acted so far against evaders from the yeshiva population.”
Rochverger’s statement comes a week after he alleged in a report written for the Israel Hofsheet organization that from November 2023 until this April, the military had significantly increased penalties for desertion against regular service and reserve troops, without a corresponding change in legal consequences for draft evaders.
Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.
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