Haredi leaders threaten to bring down Israeli government as effort to revive draft exemptions stalls
Top rabbis order coalition parties to move towards toppling government as senior lawmaker in Netanyahu's party persists with conscription bill

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Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) speaks with Aryeh Deri (L), chairman of the ultra-Orthodox party Shas, during a parliament session in Jerusalem on July 24, 2023.
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.
The president said he did not issue a ‘warning’ to Netanyahu but said a strike 'is not appropriate’ during ongoing nuclear negotiations

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President Donald Trump speaks during a swearing in ceremony for interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 28, 2025.
President Donald Trump confirmed reports that he warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call last week not to proceed with plans to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities while the U.S. and Iran continue negotiations, saying that he told the Israeli leader a strike “is not appropriate right now.”
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, the president responded to a question about the validity of the report by saying, “I’d like to be honest. Yes, I did.”
Pressed about the nature of the conversation, the president clarified, “It’s not a warning, I said I don’t think it’s appropriate. We’re having very good discussions with them [Iran] and I don’t think it’s appropriate right now.”
Trump suggested the U.S. may strike a “very strong document” with Iran “where we can go in with inspectors, we can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want but nobody’s getting killed. We can blow up a lab but nobody’s going to be in the lab, as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up, right? Two ways of doing it.”
He affirmed he told Netanyahu to hold off “because we’re very close to a solution. Now, that could change at any moment. It could change with a phone call. But right now I think they want to make a deal and if we can make a deal, save a lot of lives.”
He said a deal with Iran could be reached “over the next couple of weeks.”
Netanyahu, for his part, denied a New York Times report that he had been pressing for military action against Iran, which could upend the talks, calling it “fake news.”
On the new U.S.-Israel aid distribution mechanism in Gaza that went into effect this week, Trump said, “We’re dealing with the whole situation in Gaza. We’re getting food to the people.”
Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, speaking beside Trump, added, “I think that we are on the precipice of sending out a new terms sheet that hopefully will be delivered later on today. The president is going to review it. And I have some very good feelings about getting to a long-term resolution — temporary ceasefire and a long-term resolution, a peaceful resolution of that conflict.” Witkoff did not expand on the details of the “terms sheet” nor to whom it will be delivered.