Haredi parties deny they threatened to dissolve Knesset over lack of progress on draft exemption bill

By Sam Sokol 16 December 2025, 10:07 am

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Sam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. 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"

Ultra-Orthodox protesters against the drafting of yeshiva students to the military block Route 4, near Bnei Brak, August 19, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, deny having threatened to dissolve the Knesset, following a report by national broadcaster Kan that Haredi MKs warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they would do so if he did not speed up the process of passing a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service.

“We are not aware of this,” a Shas spokesman tells The Times of Israel, a sentiment echoed by a spokesman for MK Moshe Gafni, the leader of the Degel HaTorah faction of the United Torah Judaism party. Both Shas and the Degel HaTorah faction have expressed support for the proposed legislation, which would continue to grant military service exemptions to full-time yeshiva students while ostensibly increasing conscription among graduates of Haredi educational institutions.

“I don’t know” about this, but “apparently someone said something,” a source in UTJ’s other faction, Agudat Yisrael faction, says, adding, “the truth is, if there isn’t a law [that exempts the Haredi community from military service], there will be a problem. We do not support this [current version of the] law.”

Shas and UTJ backed off of a previous threat to dissolve the Knesset over the issue of draft exemptions in June, allowing the coalition to defeat legislation that would have forced new elections. Under parliamentary rules, because the legislation was defeated, lawmakers had to wait six months to bring another Knesset dissolution bill to a vote, a period that ended this week.

According to Kan, last week Netanyahu told Haredi lawmakers that “elections at this time would be a mistake” and that he anticipated internal coalition resistance to the bill to decrease.