Shas reportedly set to follow UTJ out of the government later this week

The ultra-Orthodox Shas party will follow United Torah Judaism’s lead and exit the coalition this week, according to Hebrew media reports.

Channel 12 news reports that the party will quit on Thursday, although a Shas spokesman tells the network that it is still waiting on instructions from its ruling Council of Torah Sages. The Kan public broadcaster also says the exit is planned for Thursday, indicating that the party is likely waiting to see if UTJ lawmakers follow through with their resignations, submitted earlier today.

Haredi news site Kikar Hashabbat reports that the meeting of Shas’s rabbinic leaders will likely take place either tomorrow or Thursday.

UTJ quit the coalition last night after being presented with a copy of a proposed enlistment bill prepared by Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein, which the party argued violated the terms of a previous compromise agreement.

Speaking with The Times of Israel this morning, Motti Babchik, a senior adviser to UTJ chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf, asserts that Shas will quit the coalition “tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, before Shabbat.”

Asked if he believed Shas remaining in the coalition in the interim provides an additional opportunity to pressure the government into meeting the Haredi parties’ demands for a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service, Babchik replies that “negotiations are a waste of time.”

“We can’t have a government that doesn’t care about yeshiva students,” he declares.

A spokesman for Shas did not respond to an inquiry by The Times of Israel regarding its next moves.

With only seven seats, UTJ is not large enough to topple the government — which holds 68 out of 120 Knesset mandates — on its own. Were Shas to quit as well, the coalition would lose its majority, falling to 50 seats.

Even if Shas also leaves the government, however, the two Haredi parties have not yet given any indication that they are interested in actively toppling the coalition at this juncture. The upcoming three-month Knesset recess, which starts on July 27, would give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu time to try to come to an agreement on the enlistment issue while ruling with a minority government.

If that too proves unsuccessful, and the legislation remains stalled, Shas and UTJ will then move to dissolve the government, Kan reported on Sunday, though they will require a workaround after an opposition-backed bill to disperse the Knesset and call early elections failed to advance last month, which forces lawmakers to wait six months before trying again.