200,000 ultra-Orthodox men block entry to Jerusalem in protest against serving in IDF

Some 200,000 ultra-Orthodox men blocked the entrance to Jerusalem on Thursday afternoon for a “million man” protest against military conscription. The gathering saw protesters attack journalists, and hundreds clashed with police as the event came to an end.

A 20-year-old man fell to his death from an unfinished high-rise building in the city center, where several ultra-Orthodox youths had gathered on several floors. Police later said they were investigating the death as a possible suicide.

The protest, billed as a prayer rally, was noted to be a rare show of unity among the various sects and streams of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, which do not often mingle with one another, and amounted to one of the largest displays of power by the community in recent years.

It was contrasted by another ultra-Orthodox event in the city just hours earlier, when reservists of the IDF’s new Haredi brigade stood for a ceremony at the Western Wall after completing their training.

Despite the organizers’ intentions and the deployment of some 2,000 police officers throughout the city, portions of the roughly 200,000-strong crowd became rowdy, with some throwing water bottles and other objects at a female journalist live on air, and others harassing passersby in the streets.

Elsewhere, crowds of men set fire to pieces of tarpaulin, and the rally devolved into fierce clashes with police after efforts were made to disperse the demonstrators.

The event ended abruptly, after a group of Haredi youth and young men ascended a partially built high-rise building and nearby cranes in the center of Jerusalem, and one of the group, a 20-year-old, fell from the unfinished building.

Magen David Adom paramedics who rushed to the scene were forced to declare him dead and, along with police, removed his body from the construction site.

The fall victim was later identified by Hebrew media outlets as Menachem Mendel Litzman.

As word of his death spread, the rally organizers declared the event over and urged participants to disperse safely, even as more than a dozen youth remained at the top of the building under construction.

According to Channel 12, the group was instructed not to attempt to return to the ground until rescue forces arrived to bring them down safely.

The Israel Police said shortly after that it had opened an investigation into the circumstances of the man’s death. Later, police said they were probing the death as a possible suicide.

Other ultra-Orthodox youths also climbed a crane and onto the roof of a gas station to observe the rally.

עצרת המיליון בירושלים: מפגינים תועדו מטפסים על מנוף ועל גג תחנת דלק סמוך למוקד הפגנת החרדים@HGoldich pic.twitter.com/0WOP0GkL3f

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— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) October 30, 2025

Anger over planned conscription law, draft dodger arrests

The protest was organized in response to the crackdown on ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, draft dodgers in recent months, during which time there have been over 870 arrests, amounting to just 7% of the 6,975 Haredi men who have been declared draft dodgers.

The fight over the conscription of military-aged men has become a point of contention over the last two years, ever since the clause in the Law for Security Service, which granted blanket military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, expired in June 2023. The following year, the High Court ruled that the government was therefore obligated to begin drafting them.

Despite the ruling, very few yeshiva students have enlisted since then, and the government has yet to pass a law regulating Haredi conscription,  fearing that doing so will lead to the collapse of the coalition due to fierce opposition from the two Haredi Knesset parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism.

But the Israel Defense Forces and the defense establishment have said that the military needs 12,000 additional combat soldiers, due to the country’s heightened security needs and the deaths and injuries to thousands of soldiers over the two years of war since the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and massacre.

While these issues have been raging on in the background over the past two years, and to varying degrees, for decades prior, it was the arrests of hundreds of yeshiva students and plans to bring a revised bill regulating military conscription to a discussion in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee next week that led leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community to organize Thursday’s rally.

It was the first event in years to bring together all aspects of ultra-Orthodox society, albeit only the men, with Channel 12 noting that the last time all the sects united was in 2014, when a similar protest was held against efforts to pass a law that would require a quota of military-aged yeshiva students to enlist in the military each year.

Still, the varied stances and divided opinions on military conscription were on display despite the rare show of unity, as each sect stuck largely to itself.

Due to the lack of consensus regarding the correct response to the crackdown on Haredi draft dodgers and varyingly hostile attitudes to the idea of being conscripted into the military, each Haredi faction was assigned a designated space in which to stand, and rabbis were instructed to keep their students with them throughout the event.

There was also no main stage and no speeches, and participants instead took part in communal prayer and recited portions from the Book of Psalms.

Some of the factions in attendance were either begrudgingly accepting of, or not openly hostile toward, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth’s revised bill to regulate military conscription. These included the Sephardic factions, represented in the Knesset by Shas, and the “Lithuanian” Ashkenazi sects, represented by the Degel Hatorah faction of United Torah Judaism.

The other half of United Torah Judaism, the Hassidic Agudat Yisrael faction, is opposed to Bismuth’s law and instead supports blanket exemptions for all Haredi yeshiva students.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the majority of the extremist Jerusalem Faction was reported to have boycotted the rally altogether, as they were unwilling to demonstrate alongside groups that have shown willingness to work with Bismuth and compromise on the matter of Haredi conscription.

Not all Haredim oppose military service

Not all Haredim would agree with the urgent need for the rally against military conscription, as hours earlier, reservists of the IDF’s ultra-Orthodox Hasmonean Brigade marked the completion of their training with a ceremony at the Western Wall, in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The reservists completed a march to the holy site, whereupon they received the Hasmonean Brigade’s signature dark blue beret and sang “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem.

עוד משהו שקורה היום בירושלים: טקס כומתה של פלוגת לוחמי המילואים של חטיבת חשמונאים החרדית
צילם: דביר אריאלי pic.twitter.com/CUJw19vADz

— הפרגוד (@moshepargod) October 30, 2025

The IDF has said that it carried out a “wide-ranging preparation process” to integrate the Haredi soldiers into the new brigade.

Soldiers in the Hasmonean Brigade are permitted to wear “Sabbath clothes” on Saturdays when not on duty, instead of military uniforms, and are required to attend prayers and a mandatory hour of Torah study daily. The troops are also required to have phones that are “kosher” — devices on which social media and most other apps are blocked.

"אני חייל חשמונאים, עם גאווה של יהודי. ובלילות אני לא ישן, את התורה אני נושם".

טקס הענקת הכומתה לחיילי חטיבת חשמונאים החרדיים הבוקר בכותל. pic.twitter.com/Bfyl09IWXq

— חרדים אקספרס (@haredimex) October 30, 2025

Traffic diversions, train station troubles

In the hours leading up to the Thursday afternoon rally, throngs of ultra-Orthodox men began arriving in Jerusalem via hired buses or on overcrowded trains.

The massive influx of rally-goers caused considerable disruptions to the traffic and public transportation systems both in and around Jerusalem, with roadblocks and route diversions coming into effect at 12 p.m., two and a half hours before the start of the rally.

In one incident, a police officer was moderately injured when he was hit by a bus carrying protesters into Jerusalem.

According to Channel 12, it is thought that the bus driver reversed suddenly at speed, and did not notice the police officer directing traffic behind him.

An investigation has been opened into the incident.

Despite extensive preparations ahead of time, disagreements arose on Thursday morning after Israel Railways announced that it would shut down Jerusalem’s only train station at 12:30 p.m. due to concerns surrounding overcrowding.

The decision infuriated ultra-Orthodox lawmakers, who argued that shuttering the station would prevent participants from reaching the event.

Eventually, a compromise was reached following a situational assessment by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and police chief Dany Levy, and the station was allowed to remain open for an additional hour.

Footage from inside Jerusalem’s Yitzhak Navon train station showed crowds of Haredi men riding up the long escalators, while next to them, streams of IDF soldiers in olive green descended into the station, in footage that was emblematic of the sharp divide in Israeli society.

Jerusalem, this morning. IDF soldiers pass ultra-Orthodox men on their way to protest against the conscription law — a protest that forced Jerusalem’s central train station to shut for most of the day.

The video was taken by @Yehonchi, who finished today another around of IDF… pic.twitter.com/2Pj6kdkzp4

— Amit Segal (@AmitSegal) October 30, 2025

The footage was taken by Yehonatan Cohen, an Israel Defense Forces reservist who finished a round of duty on Thursday.

The leader of the left-wing Democrats party Yair Golan shared the video on X, noting that many of those protesting appeared to be of conscription age, and suggesting that military police deploy to the area and “let them choose: Be part of the nation of Israel, or pay the price.”

‘They want to annihilate us religiously’

Once in the capital, several hundred protesters began marching on foot from the Chords Bridge, at the entrance to Jerusalem, toward the city center. The rallygoers, many of them children, carried blue and yellow signs declaring: “Russia is here,” and “Stalin is here.”

Cries of “damn Zionists!” could be heard echoing through the crowds at various points, and loud spiritual music was blared over speakers.

“The whole thing is a plan to keep us from keeping our religion, we’re not going to agree to send our boys there,” said Ephraim Luff, 65, a full-time yeshiva student in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak and father of eight, who was scrambling to travel to Jerusalem ahead of many of the road closures. “We understand it’s very clear, it’s not that they need us, it’s that they want to annihilate us religiously.”

Several young men were seen marching past the train station carrying a Hostages and Missing Families Forum banner, presumably stolen from a nearby home, emblazoned with the slogan: “Bringing back the hostages, bringing back hope.”

Anti-conscription protesters have regularly appropriated the slogans and symbols of the movement for a hostage deal to call for the release of draft dodgers from prison, drawing outcry from the Hostages Families Forum, which has demanded NIS 400,000 ($122,956) in damages from an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva for appropriating symbols of the movement for its campaign against the jailing of Haredi draft dodgers.

One participant approached a Times of Israel reporter with a poster labeling secular Israelis as “parasites” and imploring them to “follow the commandments.”

Security guards were then forced to lock the doors to the central bus station after Haredi rallygoers began arguing with people exiting the building, throwing water bottles and calling women Shiksas — a derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman or a Jewish woman perceived to be acting in a way considered inappropriate to the one hurling the insult.

This attitude was not shared by all rallygoers, as a yeshiva student, Abraham, who declined to give his full name, said that the goal of the demonstration was to preserve a lifestyle lived according to the Torah.

“We don’t go to the army not because we are selfish, but because we try to preserve ourselves, what the Torah tells us and the rabbis tell us,” he told AFP.

“There were hostages, and we mourned their deaths, we prayed for them three times a day, and for the soldiers,” he said.

“We love everyone, secular people, soldiers… We don’t hate anyone. We came to unify the ultra-Orthodox community, which only wants to honor God.”

Journalists become targets

In a separate incident, young ultra-Orthodox men pelted Channel 12 correspondent Inbar Twizer with water bottles as she attempted to broadcast from the scene of the mass rally.

The correspondents in the Channel 12 studio cut her off, instructing her to find a safe place to broadcast from before they resumed talking to her.

She later returned to the air, broadcasting from behind police lines.

Twizer said sticks and other objects were thrown at her and fellow reporters, and that she was not the only one forced to seek police protection in order to report on the event.

צוותי חדשות 12 הותקפו באלימות בקרשים ובקבוקים בהפגנת החרדים נגד הגיוס בירושליםhttps://t.co/PhHdO71XvI | @inbartvizer pic.twitter.com/sn5Q7dPwhx

— החדשות – N12 (@N12News) October 30, 2025

The Union of Journalists in Israel confirmed that it was “handing reports of violence against correspondents and camera crews at the Haredi protest at the entrance to Jerusalem.”

“The union is in contact with journalists in the field, and with senior police officials in the area and is providing responses to the incidents,” the group wrote on X.

“We ask journalists who are hurt to reach out to us immediately, and to send documentation of the violence,” it added, providing a link.

Protest turns violent as darkness falls

Following the abrupt end to the rally and the calls to disperse, hundreds of young ultra-Orthodox men turned instead to clashing with Border Police officers deployed throughout the city.

The officers charged the protesters after they tried to enter the construction site where Litzman fell to his death hours earlier.

Yosef Goffman, a yeshiva student from Jerusalem who attended the rally today, told The Times of Israel that he was saddened by the event’s tragic conclusion, and the subsequent scuffling with police.

He typically refrains from partaking in anti-draft demonstrations, but came to Thursday’s rally, he said, because it was endorsed by the ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset, as opposed to the radical Jerusalem Faction group, known for holding stormy protests that usually result in clashes with law enforcement.