State tells High Court all eligible Haredi men can be drafted into IDF from 2026
Defense Minister Katz reported to have tried to excise IDF’s position from state’s response, as coalition continued to work on legislation exempting most of community from service
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"
Starting in 2026, there will be no limit to the number of ultra-Orthodox servicemen the Israel Defense Forces has the capacity to enlist, the state told the High Court of Justice on Wednesday morning.
The IDF currently has the capacity to absorb 4,800 Haredim in the 2024 enlistment year ending this coming June, and around 5,700 in 2025, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara wrote in the state’s response to multiple petitions calling for all eligible ultra-Orthodox males, who until now have been largely exempt from the mandatory draft, to be conscripted.
However, while the IDF’s capacity is increasing, it has not yet managed to reach its recruitment target for 2024, she added, calling efforts to increase the number of Haredim in the military “an extraordinary practical, command and professional challenge.”
Absorbing a large influx of ultra-Orthodox soldiers will require significant efforts on the part of the IDF, including adjusting how soldiers are evaluated — with current Initial Psychotechnical Rating tests having been found unsuitable for Haredim, she added.
The figures quoted by the attorney general were consistent with those provided to lawmakers in the Knesset State Control Committee by Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, head of the IDF Personnel Directorate’s Planning and Personnel Management Division, during a hearing on Tuesday.
Going forward, “there will be tens of thousands of members of the ultra-Orthodox community under orders,” Tayeb said on Tuesday, also calling for stronger sanctions on draft dodgers.
In a landmark ruling in June, the High Court of Justice ruled unanimously that the government must draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the military since there was no longer any legal framework to continue the decades-long practice of granting them blanket exemptions from army service.
Since then, thousands of orders have gone out but few Haredim have enlisted, with the overwhelming majority of those eligible for military service remaining out of the army.
The community’s leadership is vehemently opposed to young Haredi men serving in the military, fearing they will be secularized.
According to figures cited by state representatives in court on Wednesday and in the Knesset’s State Control Committee hearing on the matter on Tuesday, 3,000 enlistment orders were sent out in the first third of the enlistment year from July to October 2024, some 400 recipients presented themselves at the IDF drafting offices, but only approximately 70 actually enlisted at the end of the process.
The low rate of enlistment angered the judges, with Justice Noam Sohlberg stating that he and his colleagues were “outraged that there are 85,000 Haredi men of military age who are not enlisting,” according to the Walla news site.
Justice Daphne Barak Erez, meanwhile, asked the state how it intended to draft 4,800 Haredi men “if enforcement measures are only taken half a year after the enlistment order is issued.”
According to the Kan public broadcaster, Barak Erez also lashed out at arguments regarding why more Haredim have not been drafted, stating that they had “no connection to reality, no reference to the current reality — we are at war.”
As of November 2024, the IDF had issued 1,126 arrest warrants to those who did not show up to the induction centers.
Wednesday’s hearing was briefly interrupted when Tamar Levy, a member of the Mothers on the Frontlines advocacy group, ran forward in the courtroom and screamed that secular Israelis “are not the donkey of the Haredim” — presumably meaning that the ultra-Orthodox community relies on other parts of the population serving in the army while it mostly refuses to share the burden, even in wartime.
According to Hebrew-language media reports, Defense Minister Israel Katz had tried to delay the filing of the state’s response because the IDF’s position that Haredi men could be recruited without limit contradicts the position adopted by the government, which is seeking to pass controversial legislation on the issue.
Katz asked the Justice Ministry several days ago not to include the military’s assessment in the state’s response to the petitions, Kan reported Tuesday.
A separate report by Channel 12 news quoted an email exchange in which senior officials in the Military Advocate General said Katz gave an order for the information to be excised from the court filing.
After Baharav-Miara filed the state’s response ahead of the hearing early on Wednesday morning, Katz dismissed the reports, tweeting: “To those who built fantasies and jumped headlong into an empty pool without water – I wish them health and success.”
Following the reports, the Movement for Quality Government, one of the groups behind the High Court lawsuit, called on the attorney general to “immediately open an investigation on suspicion of obstruction of justice and breach of trust” into Katz.
“Katz is trying to hide from the court the fact that the IDF is capable of absorbing all Haredi who are required to conscript as early as 2026,” the group stated. “This is serious criminal conduct that endangers the security of the state [and] harms reserve soldiers for the benefit of political interests.”
Coalition members have often insisted that the IDF is not capable of absorbing the estimated 70,000 Haredi males currently eligible for service.
One difficulty in mobilizing ultra-Orthodox troops is that they require a strictly religious environment and often refuse to serve alongside women.
The IDF has been working to create the infrastructure necessary to accommodate soldiers observing an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle and on Sunday it announced that the first 50 ultra-Orthodox soldiers were drafted for regular service in the Israel Defense Forces’ new Haredi brigade, known as the Hasmonean Brigade. An additional 288 Haredim were also recruited to various ultra-Orthodox units over the past week.
The government, at the behest of the Haredi Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, is attempting to pass a bill that would see some increased enlistment of ultra-Orthodox men, but would broadly maintain the wide-scale exemption from military or national service.
However, the bill is currently stuck in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, whose chairman, Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, has said that the needs of the IDF must come first and that the panel would only advance the legislation if lawmakers can reach a “broad consensus” on the matter.
Jeremy Sharon and Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.
