Haredi party fumes at Netanyahu over removal of military enlistment bill from Knesset panel agenda

The United Torah Judaism party expects Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “immediately” pass a bill regulating the status of yeshiva students liable for conscription, a spokesman for party chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf tells The Times of Israel after it emerged that the controversial legislation was removed from next week’s Knesset agenda.

“The attorney general continues to persecute Torah students, but the blame lies solely with the government, which should have passed the conscription law as it pledged in the coalition agreements and would have brought an end to the persecution,” the spokesman declares.

“We expect the prime minister to honor the agreements and immediately complete the settlement of the status of Torah students in the Land of Israel.”

Yesterday, the Attorney General’s Office released a letter detailing the military’s new plan to increase enforcement against draft evaders, eliciting harsh condemnations from representatives of Haredi coalition parties, who indicated they were running out of patience with the government over the delays to the legislation exempting yeshiva students from mandatory army service.

According to a coalition source, a vote on the coalition’s ultra-Orthodox enlistment bill was removed from the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee’s agenda for next week, delaying the advancement of the controversial legislation with just weeks to go before the end of the Knesset summer session.

The bill was originally slated to appear on the agenda next Tuesday afternoon, but “at the last minute, there were disagreements, so a different bill was placed on the agenda instead,” a source familiar with the matter has told The Times of Israel. The vote would have allowed the bill to be referred to the plenum for the final two readings necessary for it to become law.