From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Haredi politician pushes back on ‘impudent’ AG’s call for crackdown on draft evaders
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleSam 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"
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara has no authority to impose restrictions on yeshiva students, declares MK Moshe Gafni, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox Degel HaTorah faction, after the Attorney General’s Office releases a statement calling for increased enforcement and sanctions against Haredi draft evaders.
“Yeshiva students will continue to diligently study their Talmud, and nothing will stop them, not even an attorney general whom the government decided to remove from her position, and who continues to act on issues she has no authority to deal with,” Gafni says, declaring that Baharav-Miara is “impudent, corrupt, and acts against the law.”
Gafni’s faction is among the staunchest opponents of efforts to conscript Haredi men.
In a statement earlier this evening, the Attorney General’s Office insisted that it was “necessary to expand the basket of personal economic enforcement measures as soon as possible, and the army and police must also return to carrying out proactive operations and arrests against evasion from all segments of the population.”
In April, the High Court of Justice ordered the government to explain its failure to issue enough conscription orders to ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students to meet the needs of the IDF, and its failure to enforce the orders it has issued. The police subsequently announced in May that new orders had been issued to officers to detain draft dodgers and wait for the Military Police to pick them up.
A recent coalition bill to pause the arrest of evaders was frozen by the High Court of Justice.
The Times of Israel Community.