Committee vote on extension to IDF reservists’ service postponed

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"

Likud MK Yuli Edelstein (center) chairs a Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, June 26, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Likud MK Yuli Edelstein (center) chairs a Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, June 26, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee delays a vote on a Defense Ministry-backed “draft Security Service Law” which would extend a temporary measure raising the exemption age for reserve military service from 40 to 41 for soldiers and from 45 to 46 for officers for several additional months due to a manpower shortage amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

The decision came after the committee fails to reach the “broad consensus” chairman Yuli Edelstein demanded on the measure, which is meant to compensate for the IDF’s manpower shortage amidst ongoing fighting in Gaza.

“I refused to mobilize the coalition. There will be no situation that the extension of this law will pass on the bayonets of the coalition,” Edelstein says. “Either we all reject the IDF’s request or we all agree on something. I have no personal, factional, party, or coalition interest in passing it on. Either we’ll agree on something or not, but we’re all together.”

National Unity MK Gadi Eisenkot tells the committee that he would support an extension of two weeks to the temporary measure while it attempts to hammer out a compromise on the issue of ultra-Orthodox enlistment but that the way the measure was sent to the committee at the last minute “does not convey seriousness.”

Speaking with The Times of Israel following the meeting, Yesh Atid MK Moshe Tur-Paz says that he believes that “the army hasn’t shown us that it’s done its best to bring the soldiers that already on its lists to serve and therefore because we think the army and the government must do much more to bring the ultra-Orthodox to be part of the service we didn’t vote today.”

“I said during the discussion that I spoke with several officers in the reserves and they told me that soldiers at 40 or 45 years old don’t need the change of the law in order to serve, they are volunteers by any measure and they come because it is important,” he continues. “But to tell them they must come by law while others are not serving at all is not the right thing to do.”

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