From the Liveblog of
Monday, January 19, 2026
UTJ’s Eichler blames ‘judicial system’ for ‘spilling blood’ in daycare tragedy
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"
Addressing the Knesset, Deputy Communications Minister Yisrael Eichler (United Torah Judaism) blames the legal system for for today’s tragedy in Jerusalem, in which two babies died and 53 other infants and children were injured at an overcrowded, unlicensed daycare in Jerusalem’s Haredi-majority Romema neighborhood.
“I have previously warned that the Daycare Law needs to be urgently passed to ensure a woman’s rights regardless of her husband, but unfortunately” this demand went unheeded, he says. “The judicial system cannot say that our hands did not spill this blood.”
After the High Court ruled in 2024 that Haredi exemptions from military service were illegal, yeshivas harboring draft dodgers have seen their budgets slashed and the Attorney General’s Office instructed the Labor Ministry to cut daycare subsidies for the children of evaders.
Responding to critics who said that he is anti-Zionist, Eichler argues that his “family has already been in the land of Israel for 160 years” and that he was “raised to love the holy land and Jerusalem.”
Eichler, a member of UTJ’s Agudat Yisrael faction, was just sworn in as a deputy minister this evening and resigned under the Norwegian Law. He is being replaced by Degel HaTorah’s Yitzhak Pindrus. Eichler became a minister despite his party as a whole not returning to the coalition.
The Times of Israel Community.