From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Deri predicts Haredi draft exemption bill will pass this summer
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"
In a pre-Passover interview with Shas party mouthpiece Haderech, the party’s chairman, Aryeh Deri, declares that there is sufficient support within the Knesset for a law exempting yeshiva students from military service and that he expects such legislation to pass in the summer after the end of the parliamentary recess.
“The draft of the conscription law is ready. If we had brought it to a vote in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, it would have passed. I believe it would have passed in the plenum as well. But war broke out and our rabbis rightly thought that this was not the time to promote such a thing during wartime. With God’s help, we will settle the issue in the summer session. This is another reason why the summer session is very important,” says Deri.
Following the outbreak of war with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that the coalition was putting aside the controversial legislation. However, on Monday evening, Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth, a Likud MK, told the Knesset that the bill will be put back on the agenda as part of a legislative package intended to shore up the IDF as it is strained by fighting on multiple fronts.
The bill has come under fire from IDF brass, the attorney general, and a wide array of other critics, who have objected to it on the grounds that it is full of loopholes, preserves inequality in the mandatory draft, and will not increase Haredi enlistment amid what the military says is an urgent manpower shortage.
The Times of Israel Community.