The ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism announced on Wednesday that it “considered itself released from prior agreements,” and will consult with its spiritual leadership prior to votes in the Knesset about whether or not to support them. However, the party said UTJ would not threaten the collapse of the government.
The announcement was made as an attempt to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to advance with a new bill to regulate haredi IDF service.
While increasing haredi draft numbers, the bill would still likely exempt most military-age haredim from service, and faces strong pushback from reservists and other groups, as well as from some members of the Coalition.
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman, MK Yuli Edelstein, said earlier on Wednesday that the committee will hold “a few more final discussions to cover all relevant material and hear from all pertinent parties” before formulating a draft of a new bill.
The committee has held dozens of meetings regarding the new law encompassing various military, economic, and social aspects, but the bill has yet to be formulated. This is because rather than begin proceedings from scratch, and in order to avoid having to receive approval from the Attorney-General’s Office, the government revived a version of a bill that passed its first reading in 2022 under the Bennett-Lapid government. Edelstein has said many times that the former bill would only serve as a structure for the new bill, and that the bill would be fundamentally altered.
An update on the haredi draft
Wednesday’s meeting included an update on haredi draft numbers and a review of the Central Bureau of Statistics’ (CBS) data on the size of the haredi community.
The legality of the haredi exemption from IDF service officially ended in June 2024. Lt. Col. Avigdor Dickstein, Head of the Ultra-Orthodox Affairs Unit within the IDF Personnel Directorate, reported that since the beginning of the current draft year in July 2024, a total of 18,915 orders were issued ultra-Orthodox draft-age individuals, of which 232 individuals actually enlisted, including 57 in combat roles. He noted that 962 have been declared draft-dodgers, and 68 have received exemptions for various reasons.
Dickstein added that since January 2025, 340 ultra-Orthodox individuals were delayed at Ben-Gurion Airport due to draft orders, including 18 upon entering the country and 322 upon leaving. The departure of 100 individuals in total was prevented, and approximately 50% of them were ultra-Orthodox, Dickstein said.
The Attorney General’s Office claimed on numerous occasions since June that there a number of economic and other sanctions that the government could enact against haredim who ignore draft orders. However, Dickstein said that the most significant and effective sanction in place was apprehending draft dodgers at Ben-Gurion Airport, as no other sanctions exist at the moment. He added that while arrests are possible, they are not effective in the long run.
Dickstein added that the number of ultra-Orthodox recruits since July, including those who received draft orders prior to that date, stands at 1,721, and admitted that the IDF will not reach its goal, which it committed to in court, of drafting 4,800 ultra-Orthodox in the 2024-2025 draft year.
Dr. Ahmad Khalichal presented data on behalf of the CBS, and explained that the CBS employs several methods to predict who is ultra-Orthodox, including election results, survey data, and education-related data. Additionally, projections rely on a machine learning model developed by the CBS and applied to the 2022 population data.
The predictions use statistical models combining all available sources indicating that a person is 'ultra-Orthodox,' such as religious education, place of birth, parents' place of birth, gender, percentage of ultra-Orthodox in the residential area, number of siblings, and more, Khalichal explained. he noted that these models were probabilistic and not absolute, with an overall accuracy rate of 86%.
Khalichal said that the total number of non-ultra-Orthodox Jews is 5,912,000, while the total number of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel is 1,189,000. One-third of Jewish children born in 2022 were from the ultra-Orthodox community, and the percentage is expected to rise over the years. While the fertility rate for Jewish women in the general population stands at just under 3, it is approximately 7 in the ultra-Orthodox community, he said.
Regarding employment rates for individuals aged 18-26 between 2017 and 2024, the employment rate for ultra-Orthodox women stood at nearly 90%, while for men it was less than 30%.
Some 67% of ultra-Orthodox men and 72% of ultra-Orthodox women aged 20-29 were married, Khalichal added. Regarding socioeconomic status, over 70% of the ultra-Orthodox population fell into the two lowest socioeconomic clusters.
According to the CBS, the size of the draft cohort (age 18) in 2017 was 9,584, in 2024 it was 13,428, in 2030 it is expected to reach 17,950.
