The United Torah Judaism party’s Degel HaTorah faction announced on Wednesday that it had received a “green light” from its senior spiritual leaders, rabbis Dov Lando and Moshe Hirsch, to support a government bill under debate in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee enshrining Haredi exemption from military service.

In a statement, the ultra-Orthodox faction said that according to the directive, the bill should be submitted “as soon as possible,” after which, and before a Knesset vote on it, “the proposal will be placed on the desk of the great Torah leaders… where a final decision will be made regarding how to vote on the law.”

For the past year, the Haredi leadership has pushed to pass a law largely keeping its constituency out of the Israel Defense Forces, after the High Court ruled that decades-long blanket exemptions from army duty traditionally afforded to full-time Haredi yeshiva students were illegal.

Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted. The IDF has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits due to the strain on standing and reserve forces caused by the war against Hamas in Gaza and other military challenges.

The IDF has increased enforcement against evasion but its arrests of Haredi draft dodgers have not led to an increase in enlistment and have been panned as largely ineffective by the IDF’s Personnel Directorate.

Despite Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth (Likud) announcing in October that he would soon submit a revised draft of the bill to the committee, with the intention of bringing it to a final plenum vote in December, the legislation’s progress since then has been marked by repeated delays caused by ultra-Orthodox intransigence and internal opposition to the bill within the coalition.

Asked what developments had prompted........

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