From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Shas MKs visit Haredi draft dodgers in prison, vow their support for bill providing exemptions
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. 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"
Shas MKs Moshe Abutbul and Yonatan Mashriki visit Haredi draft dodgers held in military prison and inform them that the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox faction is working “to immediately advance the law that will regulate the status of yeshiva students,” allowing them to return to their studies, a party spokesman says in a statement.
“We came to strengthen and we left strengthened. It is hard to believe that in the Jewish state, young men are being arrested for the crime of studying Torah,” the MKs said during the visit.
Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted. The IDF has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits due to the strain on standing and reserve forces caused by the war against Hamas in Gaza and other military challenges. The IDF has arrested multiple draft dodgers in recent months as part of an effort at enforcement.
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is currently debating a controversial government-backed bill to regulate the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The legislation, as currently laid out, would continue to grant military service exemptions to full-time yeshiva students while purportedly increasing conscription among graduates of Haredi educational institutions.
However, the bill would also remove various provisions from a previous version of the bill that were intended to ensure that those registered for yeshiva study are actually studying, and would cancel all sanctions on draft evaders when they turn 26.
The bill is supported by Shas, while the United Torah Judaism party’s Degel HaTorah and Agudat Yisrael factions are split. Multiple members of the coalition, including within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, have come out against the bill, which has been dismissed as an “evasion law” by critics.
The Times of Israel Community.