Army complains of manpower shortage as Knesset restarts work on draft exemption bill

‘We will very soon reach the region of ​​80,000-90,000 draft dodgers,’ IDF official tells MKs, as PM launches last-ditch campaign to pass law sparing Haredim from conscription

The IDF’s manpower shortage is expected to grow considerably in the coming months, a senior military officer told lawmakers on Wednesday, as the Knesset resumed discussing controversial legislation aimed at enshrining the decades-old exemption of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from conscription.

Addressing the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, head of the IDF Personnel Directorate’s Planning and Personnel Management Division, said that the number of troops the IDF lacks is slated to soon rise from 12,000 to 17,000 — despite a small but insufficient increase in Haredi recruits from around 700 annually before the war to around 2,800 currently.

According to Tayeb, 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.

“We will very soon reach ​​80,000 to 90,000 draft dodgers,” Tayeb said, adding that the army is ready and able to absorb twice as many Haredim as are currently enlisting.

Tayeb’s warning came only days after Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir told the committee that the military needs more soldiers “immediately,” amid ongoing multifront fighting, and the IDF issued a warning that the reserve army could “collapse” if appropriate legislation is not advanced by the government.

Zamir has also repeatedly urged the government to again extend mandatory military service for men to 36 months, after it was shortened to 30 months in August 2024.

The fight to draft the Haredim

Turning to the coalition’s ultra-Orthodox draft exemption bill, which was returned to the Knesset agenda on Wednesday, Tayeb said that the IDF had “not been presented with a new draft that was substantially different from the previous versions that we discussed in dozens of prior discussions.

Addressing the committee in December, Tayeb said that the legislation fell short of solving the IDF’s manpower shortage. In January, he told lawmakers that up to 80 percent of all draft evaders are ultra-Orthodox.

Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted, despite the persistent IDF manpower shortage. The ultra-Orthodox parties have long demanded a law enshrining their communities’ exemption from military service.

This effort was kicked into overdrive after the High Court in June 2024 ruled that there was no legal basis for the Haredi yeshiva students’ decades-long blanket exemption from the draft.

The coalition’s draft exemption bill — which would ostensibly increase military conscription in the Haredi community, but ultimately enables continued exemptions for full-time yeshiva students — is widely seen as legally iffy and loophole-laden and has generated intense resistance even among members of Netanyahu’s coalition.

Dissolving the Knesset

Wednesday morning’s session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee finished only hours before lawmakers voted in favor of a preliminary reading of a government-backed bill to dissolve the Knesset — an initiative launched by the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party after Netanyahu told Haredi MKs that the coalition didn’t have the votes to pass the draft exemption legislation, and reportedly asked them to agree to shelve the bill until after the elections. The dissolution bill sets no date for elections, which have to be held in any case by October 27.

In an effort to win the Haredim over and avoid the September election that the Haredim are widely believed to favor, Netanyahu placed the bill back on the parliamentary agenda, but the move was rejected by Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of the UTJ subfaction Degel Hatorah, who instructed lawmakers earlier this week “not to get drawn into political games and to support the dissolution of the Knesset.”

Speaking with The Times of Israel on Tuesday, Haredi political sources denied claims by officials close to Netanyahu that he had managed to convince a majority of lawmakers to finally pass the controversial exemption bill.

A stormy debate

Wednesday’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee debate was especially heated, with multiple people, including Yesh Atid MK Moshe Tur-Paz, ejected from the chamber.

Pushing back against the bill, Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, a staunch opponent of the legislation who was pushed out as committee chairman last summer, argued that it poses a danger to the future of the political right in Israel.

“Arguments have been made here that this is a discussion… intended to preserve the coalition. I see things exactly the opposite. I think this is a discussion that could bury right-wing rule in the State of Israel,” Edelstein declared.

Edelstein also harshly criticized Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs, who appeared to claim that IDF Chief of Staff Zamir supported the legislation.

Addressing the committee, Fuchs stated that Zamir, “in classified letters sent to the cabinet and the government,” emphasized that both extending the terms of service of IDF recruits and passing “a conscription law that regulates the situation” are necessary.

Zamir “explicitly said, ‘I want the three laws to pass,’” Fuchs told lawmakers, referring to the service extension, Haredi draft bill and a law regulating reserve service.

The government’s law is necessary because “you cannot change the lifestyle of the Haredi public by force,” Fuchs argued. “When it comes to a confrontation with 80,000–90,000 young Haredi men, what do you want to do? Set up detention facilities, or enlist soldiers into the IDF?”

Hitting back, Edelstein called Fuchs’s statement “embarrassing,” countering that “in an official statement, the chief of staff said he did not mean this specific law.”

Speaking with The Times of Israel following the hearing, committee member MK Evgeny Sova of the opposition party Yisrael Beytenu also accused Fuchs of lying.

“The chief of staff sat in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee a week and a half ago and said, ‘I am crying out, I don’t have soldiers.’ That’s all. After something like that, coming and saying that the chief of staff supports the bill is simply just an absolute lie,” Sova said.

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett also slammed the government over the bill during a press conference in the Knesset on Wednesday afternoon, arguing that its insistence on advocating for Haredi draft exemptions was killing Israeli troops.

IDF soldiers “are being told that they need to abandon positions they have already captured, simply because there are no soldiers to hold those positions. And then they have to capture that same position a second and third time. This costs us soldiers’ lives. It cannot go on like this,” he said.