Haredi parties said to be close to withdrawing from coalition over draft exemptions, but reportedly don’t plan to topple government

The United Torah Judaism party’s Degel Hatorah faction is threatening to withdraw from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition within the day unless it is presented with a draft of a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service.

“The next few hours are definitely the last to save the prime minister. If a draft law is not submitted in the next few hours, the decision will be made,” a party source tells Channel 12.

Another source in the party tells the network that Aryeh Deri, the chairman of fellow ultra-Orthodox party Shas, is also “applying very heavy pressure to immediately withdraw from the coalition,” presumably on UTJ, and “doesn’t want to do it alone, so that they don’t say he is the one bringing down the government.”

According to national broadcaster Kan, two of Degel Hatorah’s senior rabbinical leaders sent a letter to party MKs instructing them that “in the absence of a law by this evening, Degel Hatorah will immediately withdraw from the government.”

The letter was sent by rabbis Moshe Hirsch, the dean of Bnei Brak’s Slabodka yeshiva, and Dov Lando, the senior leader of the so-called Lithuanian stream of non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodoxy. Both are members of the faction’s ruling Council of Torah Sages.

Kan also reports that Deri could pull Shas out of the coalition within days, as the start of the Knesset summer recess approaches on July 27 without any progress having been made toward legalizing the exemption of Haredi men from mandatory military service.

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein has long blocked the passage of a government-backed bill enshrining the broad exclusion from IDF service for Haredi men, but agreed last month to soften some of the harsh sanctions included in his proposed bill, in a last-minute deal with Shas and UTJ to prevent them from voting in favor of an opposition-backed bill to disperse the Knesset and call early elections, in the days ahead of the war with Iran last month.

But as Edelstein’s new, watered-down version of the bill has failed to materialize, having been pulled from the committee’s agenda for this week, the Haredi parties have again run out of patience.

To that end, Kan reported yesterday that Deri has told party officials to begin preparing to resign from the government in the coming days and join the opposition. The move is being coordinated with UTJ, the report said.

While this would leave Netanyahu’s 67-person strong coalition suddenly lacking a ruling majority in the 120-member Knesset, the report said that Shas and UTJ — which have 18 Knesset seats combined — do not intend to topple the government at this time.

The lengthy recess would give Netanyahu time to try and resolve the issue.