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Saturday, July 12, 2025
Netanyahu, Edelstein to discuss Haredi draft legislation, after bill pulled from agenda
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"
Only days after it emerged that a vote on the government’s ultra-Orthodox conscription bill had been removed from this week’s Knesset agenda, national broadcaster Kan reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is slated to meet with Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein to discuss the long-stalled legislation.
According to Kan, the updated legislation is likely to be presented to the military in the coming days, during which time the Haredi United Torah Judaism and Shas parties’ legislative boycott, intended to pressure Edelstein to advance the bill, will continue.
The United Torah Judaism party demanded on Thursday that Netanyahu “immediately” pass a bill broadly exempting Haredi men from IDF conscription, calling on him to honor his coalition agreements and “complete the settlement of the status of Torah students in the Land of Israel.”
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 this 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 on 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 told The Times of Israel on Thursday. The vote would have allowed the bill to be referred to the plenum for the final two readings necessary before becoming law.
Members of the committee have yet to be presented with a draft of the revised legislation, whose sanctions on draft dodgers were reportedly watered down by Edelstein last month as part of a last-ditch effort to prevent the Haredim from voting in favor of dissolving the Knesset.
The Attorney General’s Office released a letter on Wednesday 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.
The Times of Israel Community.