The Knesset on Thursday struck down a bill that would have called an election later this year, with Haredi parties agreeing to another week of negotiations on penalties for yeshiva students who avoid the IDF draft.

The bill to disperse the Knesset was voted down 53-61 at about 3 a.m., and as a consequence, opposition parties will not be able to propose similar legislation for six months. The Haredi parties, however, could still submit a bill to call an early election should negotiations not go their way.

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein was optimistic that the sides would come to an agreement, announcing shortly before the vote that “agreements about the principles on which the conscription bill will be based,” had been reached. 

“Only a real, effective bill that will expand the IDF’s basis of enlistment will come out of a committee that I lead,” Edelstein added. “We are on the way to a real repair of Israeli society and the security of the State of Israel.” 

Haredi parties Shas and United Torah Judaism had threatened to bring down the government over legislation regarding the draft of yeshiva students into the IDF. 

The High Court of Justice ordered the government last year to actively conscript Haredi yeshiva students after they were exempted for decades. Leading Haredi rabbis have said they oppose any young men from their communities enlisting in the IDF, even if they are not learning Torah full time.

The bill in question sets rising target numbers for Haredi conscription, reaching 50% in five years. The dispute between Edelstein and Haredi parties centered around the penalties for Haredi men aged 18-26 who do not report to the IDF after receiving draft notices. 

Edelstein reportedly agreed to delay some of the sanctions on yeshiva students who do not enlist. The new version of the bill will include immediate bans on receiving drivers licenses and leaving the country and canceling affirmative action for government jobs and subsidies for college degrees for those who do not report for IDF service. However, the discount on daycare tuition will remain in place for six months after a missed draft date, and welfare payments will continue for a year. Housing subsidies would not be canceled for two years after avoiding the draft. 

Yeshivas with students that avoid conscription will lose government subsidies; if 75% of the annual draft target is not met, the government will stop subsidizing all Haredi yeshivas.

Israeli Opposition Leader Yair Lapid accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “spitting in the faces of IDF fighters. Once again you sold out our combat soldiers  — for what? For two more weeks? Three more? … The government allowed [the Haredim] to ignore the reservists and help them [ensure] draft avoidance for tens of thousands of healthy young people.”

The Knesset is set to hold a preliminary vote on Wednesday to trigger an early election — and crucial partners in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition are threatening to support it.

For the past week, Haredi parties have said they would vote in favor of legislation that would dissolve the Knesset and schedule an election for this fall. The parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, are threatening to jump ship because the coalition has not passed a law to continue the long-standing exemption for full-time yeshiva students from IDF conscription.

Without Shas and UTJ, Netanyahu’s coalition would be left with 50 members, far short of the 61-seat majority he needs to keep his government afloat.

As such, Netanyahu and his allies have been frantically trying to negotiate a compromise that will keep the Haredi parties in the fold. 

Past laws exempting young Haredi men from military service have expired and a new one has not been passed, leading the High Court of Justice to order the government last year to actively conscript them.

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein, who is responsible for ushering a bill to a vote that would codify the status of young Haredi men and set rising enlistment targets for the coming years, has said he will not move it forward unless it includes significant penalties for yeshiva students who refuse to serve. These reportedly include canceling daycare and housing subsidies and bans on leaving the country and receiving a driver’s license before age 29. 

Likud and other parties leading Israel over the past half-century allowed the Haredi exemption to continue out of political expedience. But that position has become politically and militarily untenable in the more than 600 days since the war in Gaza began and hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been called for reserve duty, with some serving for hundreds of days. 

In addition to Edelstein, several other coalition lawmakers and Cabinet ministers have similarly said they will not support a bill that would continue to allow the vast majority of Haredi men between the ages of 18-24 to decline IDF service without sanctions.

Those sanctions are a red line for the Haredi parties, for whom maintaining their communities’  practice of yearslong full-time yeshiva study has become a key political issue. As such, the parties’ spiritual leaders instructed their politicians to force new elections if penalties for avoiding IDF service are put in place. 

While the gaps between the sides are significant and the disputes are serious, Netanyahu has managed to keep coalitions afloat in seemingly hopeless political situations before.

Several factors are working to his advantage. Most significantly,the Haredim are not likely to find themselves in a better situation after a new election. Opposition parties are even more opposed to yeshiva students’ exemption from the draft than those currently in power, and they favor more liberal policies on other religion and state issues that are important to Haredim. 

As such, the best an election can do for the Haredim is to buy time, hope the war will end and bet that public pressure to draft their young voters will abate. One senior Shas rabbi predicted that the current coalition parties will “come crawling” back to the Haredi parties after an election. 

The leading rabbi of one of the Hasidic sects within United Torah Judaism, Belz, opposes holding an election during wartime, and his representative, Jerusalem Affairs Minister Meir Porush, has also been working to try to stop the dissolution of the Knesset.

In addition, the vote on Wednesday is a preliminary one, which means that in order for the Knesset to call an election, three more votes on the matter would be necessary. While it would be possible to go through the whole process in a day, Netanyahu and his coalition would likely drag out those votes for as long as possible, at least past July 23, when the Knesset’s long summer recess begins. 

If the bill is voted down, it cannot be brought to a vote again for six months, though a different party could put forward a similar bill days later.

If the law passes, an election would have to be held after a minimum of 90 days and no more than five months after the Knesset is dissolved.

During that time, a caretaker government would comprise the current Cabinet members, who would still be led by Netanyahu. There are few limits in Israeli law to what a caretaker government can do, and the High Court has been inconsistent about the kinds of decisions a government can make after the Knesset is dispersed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition was thrown into disarray on Wednesday night after the spiritual leaders of Haredi factions threatened to bring about an early election if penalties for yeshiva students avoiding military service are not canceled.

The leading rabbis of Agudat Yisrael, the Hasidic party of United Torah Judaism, told party leader Yitzchak Goldknopf on Tuesday to move forward with vote next week on a bill to dissolve the Knesset, calling an election, because Netanyahu did not keep a promise to pass a bill exempting young Haredi men from military service by Shavuot, a holiday that was observed on Monday in Israel. On Wednesday morning, the other part of United Torah Judaism, Degel Hatorah, received a similar directive from the senior rabbis of the “Litvak” non-Hasidic Haredi community, Dov Lando and New York-native Moshe Hillel Hirsch.

Still, Netanyahu’s 68-seat coalition would retain a narrow majority in the Knesset even if he lost those Haredi parties’ seven seats.

The political threat became more acute on Wednesday evening, when Sephardic Haredi party Shas, which has 11 seats in the Knesset, supported UTJ’s move to call an election. Israeli media reported that Shas’ spiritual leader Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef told the party’s lead negotiator, former minister Ariel Atias, to tell Netanyahu that he will not have a government if agreements are not reached with the Haredi parties.

Shas has functioned as an electoral satellite of Netanyahu’s in recent years, with its base holding right-wing views and strongly supporting the prime minister. The party has campaigned with the slogan “Bibi [Netanyahu] needs a strong lion,” playing on the Hebrew meaning of Shas leader Aryeh Deri’s name. Yet Yosef reportedly told Atias that he should reach out to opposition parties, in effect ending Shas’ reflexive support for Netanyahu.

The Haredi parties’ threat to topple the coalition may be empty because they have no good alternatives. Opposition parties are even less likely to support the Haredi position, calling for a blanket exemption with no penalties for full-time yeshiva students who avoid the IDF draft – one poll from this year showed that 92% of left-wing voters and 82% of centrist voters oppose a Haredi draft exemption – and they disagree with Haredim on other major issues of religion and state.

Netanyahu met on Wednesday night with Haredi party representatives and, separately, with Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein, the lead lawmaker on the conscription bill. Following the meeting, Netanyahu’s office said “there is a way to bridge the gaps on the topic of the draft,” and that the prime minister would hold another meeting with Atias, Edelstein and Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs on Thursday evening to find a solution. Despite the positive readout from the Prime Minister’s Office, Yosef’s instruction to Atias to support the government’s dissolution reportedly came after the meeting.

The crux of the dispute between Edelstein, a senior Likud Knesset member, and the Haredi parties is that the former has persistently pursued sanctions for yeshiva students who avoid the draft, while Haredi parties consider such penalties to be a red line. 

While the bill, whose text is not yet final, has not been made public, it reportedly includes a target of 10,500 new Haredi recruits in the next two years out of 82,000 eligible Haredi men aged 18-24. Sanctions on draft-dodgers would remain in place even if the targets are met, and reportedly include canceling discounts on municipal taxes and public transportation, exclusion from subsidized housing programs and daycare and a ban on receiving a drivers license until age 29. Those who avoid conscription could also be arrested when attempting to leave the country.

The Haredi parties also want volunteers in Magen David Adom emergency medical services, ZAKA, and civilian service in government offices to be officially recognized and avoid sanctions, but Edelstein has insisted that only IDF enlistment would count.

Following a meeting with Haredi lawmakers on Wednesday, Edelstein said, “There is nothing new under the sun. The enlistment bill outline that I presented last night in the meeting is the same one we have been discussing for over a year. A law without personal, effective sanctions, high enlistment targets with a rapid increasing rate is not enlistment but evasion, and therefore I have opposed it the entire time.”

“While IDF soldiers and commanders are in the middle of their efforts to defeat Hamas, I am committed to them and their families for Israel’s security to broaden the IDF’s base of conscription, to ensure we can build up our forces for generations and ease the burden on the reservists,” he added.

Full-time Haredi yeshiva students have been exempt from the IDF draft since the inception of the state; first unofficially in the hundreds, and then officially in the tens of thousands as of 1999. That exemption, known as the Tal Law, was struck down by Israel’s High Court of Justice in 2012, and disputes over the topic have been a constant, major feature of Israeli politics ever since. 

In June 2024, the High Court ruled that the IDF and government must actively conscript Haredim, because there is no longer an exemption law in place. 

The IDF reported last month that 5% of the 24,000 Haredim who received call-up letters in the past year reported to the recruitment office. In the first four months of 2025,  23% of Haredim who were called up reported for duty. 

While the exemption was never popular in the general public, opposition to it surged following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, after which hundreds of thousands of Israelis were called up to fight the war in Gaza and the IDF has complained of personnel shortages. A January poll from the Israel Democracy Institute showed 68% of Israelis oppose a law allowing Haredim to avoid the draft, including 75% of non-Haredi Jews and 60% of voters for Netanyahu’s Likud party.