Haredi parties reject latest draft exemption bill, setting stage for Sept. elections

Spiritual leader of ultra-Orthodox faction believes Netanyahu has no intention of letting the bill pass into law, is instead trying to use it for a larger electoral maneuver

The Knesset’s ultra-Orthodox parties have rejected the latest draft of the coalition’s Haredi conscription exemption bill, Channel 12 reported on Sunday, calling the future of the controversial legislation into question.

The latest hurdle to the bill’s passage means it is likely that the two Haredi parties in the Knesset, United Torah Judaism and Shas, will continue pushing to bring elections forward by about a month, likely to September 15 in the middle of the High Holidays, as they have increasingly tied the two issues together.

The rejection of the bill by the Haredi parties came hours after Hebrew media outlets reported that the leadership of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee was preparing to distribute an updated draft of the controversial legislation to lawmakers.

The legislation — which would ostensibly increase military conscription in the Haredi community, but ultimately enable continued exemptions for full-time yeshiva students — is widely seen as legally dubious and laden with loopholes.

The bill has generated intense resistance even among members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, and was briefly taken off the table in March with the outbreak of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

However, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Boaz Bismuth later announced that he would continue to push the bill through, although it failed to progress due to a last-minute disagreement with the United Torah Judaism party’s Degel HaTorah faction’s rabbinic leadership over the bill’s contents.

Netanyahu later informed the Haredi parties that the coalition did not have a majority to pass the controversial legislation, and suggested waiting until after the 2026 elections. When the Haredi parties rejected that option and began to push for the dissolution of the Knesset earlier this month, the bill was once again put back on the parliamentary agenda as the premier sought to win them back over.

At the same time, Netanyahu began putting pressure on coalition MKs opposed to the legislation to come around and support it.

Despite the premier’s efforts, however, a spokesman for Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of Degel HaTorah, told the Times of Israel on Sunday that he had instructed MKs from his faction “not to advance the bill at this time.”

The implication was that Lando does not believe the exemption law will actually end up passing, and that the recent push to advance it through the Knesset is part of a larger electoral maneuver on Netanyahu’s part.

The leading Haredi rabbi previously told lawmakers last week “not to get drawn into political games.”

The ultra-Orthodox parties have been pushing to dissolve the Knesset over the failure to pass an exemption bill they deem to be satisfactory, and reportedly favor an election date in early September.

Lawmakers voted unanimously last week in favor of a preliminary reading of a government-backed bill to dissolve the Knesset, potentially triggering slightly earlier elections if ultimately passed into law.

The dissolution bill does not specify an election date, although elections must be held within five months of it passing, which would mean mid- to late-October at the latest.

Elections must, in any case, be held by October 27.

Over 79,000 conscription orders have been issued to ultra-Orthodox men since the High Court of Justice ruled in 2024 that they were obligated to enlist, after the law allowing for blanket exemptions expired the previous year.

Since that time, only 2,100 have enlisted, while the police have avoided arresting those who have ignored enlistment orders. Between January 2025 and January 2026, only 17 ultra-Orthodox men were proactively arrested by police for draft evasion.

According to the IDF, there are currently around 32,000 people classified as draft evaders — while another 50,000 others have received a formal warning ahead of their formal declaration by the government as draft evaders — and the number of evaders could soon climb as high as 80,000 to 90,000.

The military has repeatedly warned that, after more than two years of war, it is facing a severe manpower shortage.