From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
AG’s office urges Katz to immediately impose sanctions on Haredi draft 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"
The Attorney General’s Office calls on Defense Minister Israel Katz to advance sanctions on ultra-Orthodox draft evaders with all “necessary urgency,” arguing that the “negligible” response rate among those who received military enlistment orders harms national security and imposes an unfair burden on other segments of the population.
In a letter to the Defense Ministry, Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon notes that Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara wrote to Katz earlier this month stressing the “importance of him taking immediate action” in order to “improve enforcement and impose personal sanctions against evaders that do not require new legislation.”
However, “to date, the minister has not responded to the attorney general’s letter,” Limon writes, adding that various ministries have proposed sanctions on housing and business subsidies and the revocation of property tax discounts.
While Baharav-Miara has been outspoken in her advocacy for sanctions on draft evaders, her office has not indicated that it is looking into a growing ecosystem of ultra-Orthodox organizations actively encouraging yeshiva students to ignore IDF enlistment orders.
In June 2024, the High Court ruled that the government must draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the military, since there was no longer any legal framework to continue the decades-long practice of granting them blanket exemptions from service.
Haredi leaders vehemently oppose members of the community serving in the military, fearing they will be secularized. The issue, long a sensitive one in Israeli public discourse due to the perceived inequality created by the blanket exemption, has taken on renewed urgency with the military contending with a severe manpower shortage since the outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023.
Katz has himself stated that he believes enlistment should be ramped up slowly and that eventually half of eligible draftees could end up serving while the rest continue studying in yeshivas, sparking a backlash among Likud lawmakers.
At an ultra-Orthodox Purim event last week, Katz declared, “The world of Jewish Torah can never be harmed,” after mentioning the government’s work on Haredi conscription legislation.
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