Lapid urges Katz to issue 7,000 draft orders for Haredim as announced by Gallant last week

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid calls on newly appointed Defense Minister Israel Katz not to start his term in office with a “complete surrender to politics and the complete neglect of the IDF fighters,” demanding that he issue the 7,000 enlistment orders to members of the ultra-Orthodox community announced last week under his predecessor Yoav Gallant.

If Katz fails to issue the orders and announce his opposition to legislation to exempt the Haredim from military service then “he will go down from the stage of history as someone who had the opportunity to be the minister of security [but] preferred to be the minister of evasion.”

“If these orders stop, or disappear, or evaporate or dissolve, then Israel Katz is not the defense minister…he’s a petty politician who received a political appointment because [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu said to himself that ‘there is no problem pushing him around, he has no backbone.'”

Asked by The Times of Israel about reports that Netanyahu told his cabinet that Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara’s support for the removal of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is “the fastest way to a constitutional crisis,” Lapid says that the far-right minister poses a danger to the State of Israel.

“I don’t know what [Netanyahu] said in the cabinet. The question is if Ben Gvir can or can’t — I think he can’t — live up to his position. He is a danger to the nation of Israel,” Lapid replies.

“But that decision is the decision of the High Court and if that is the decision of the court, it needs to be obeyed because that is the law. I’m not convinced that the government will disobey the court, because that’s beyond the pale and the end of the State of Israel as we know it as a democracy.”