The petitioners behind the High Court's freeze on disputed government funding have now asked the court to release a series of urgent transfers for local authorities and communities in the North and South, while keeping coalition and sectoral funding blocked.
The request, filed by Hiddush and Democrats MK Naama Lazimi, marks the latest turn in a dispute over hundreds of millions of shekels approved by the Knesset Finance Committee during the election recess.
The Knesset pushed back on Monday, arguing that the petitioners' own willingness to distinguish between urgent and other funding undermines their original claim that the August 4 Finance Committee meeting at which the transfers were approved was unlawful. It again asked the court to dismiss the petition and lift the freeze altogether.
For now, most of the disputed funding remains blocked.
Petitioners seek to narrow High Court funding freeze
Civil emergency expenditures were excluded when Justice Alex Stein first froze the transfers on August 5, and on Friday the High Court separately released the full NIS 78 million transfer for the Religious Services Ministry.
The remaining Education Ministry and National Missions Ministry transfers remain frozen unless the court decides otherwise.
The petitioners are now asking to narrow that freeze further.
Among the funding they want released are parts of a National Missions Ministry transfer intended for recovery and development programs in the North and South, including western Negev rehabilitation, support for communities near threatened borders, and development and rehabilitation programs in Beersheba, Ashkelon and elsewhere.
They also asked to release most of a separate Education Ministry transfer, including payments to the ministry's headquarters and reimbursements to local authorities for expenses they have already incurred running the "Schools of the Great Vacation" summer program.
Concerns over those payments predate the latest filing: the Federation of Local Authorities previously warned the court that the freeze could leave municipalities carrying costs they had already incurred and could affect payments to workers.
Coalition-linked funding would remain frozen
At the same time, the petitioners want coalition-linked portions of the Education Ministry and National Missions Ministry transfers to remain frozen, including NIS 16.49 million within the education transfer and tens of millions of shekels in coalition funding allocated through the National Missions Ministry.
They also oppose releasing a broader increase to the National Missions Ministry's budget.
The distinction puts the petitioners in the unusual position of asking the court to release some of the very transfers they originally succeeded in freezing.
That follows a back-and-forth that began at last Tuesday's hearing, when the Finance Ministry asked to submit a list of urgent transfers that it believed should be excluded from the interim order.
The petitioners said they would not oppose releasing funding that genuinely met the urgency threshold, and the court instructed the ministry to submit a list.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich then opposed splitting the budget requests and asked the court to treat them as a single package, arguing that the underlying legal question was the same for all of them.
The High Court declined to lift the freeze wholesale and instead ultimately released only the Religious Services Ministry transfer after receiving additional information on the pressure facing the ministry.
In their latest filing, Hiddush and Lazimi went further, alleging that Smotrich prevented the Finance Ministry from submitting the professional list of urgent transfers it had asked permission to prepare.
They said they were therefore attempting themselves, based on the information available to them, to identify funding whose urgency was clear.
They acknowledged that they do not have all of the information available to the Finance Ministry and that their list may therefore be imperfect.
Knesset challenges petitioners’ distinction between transfers
It argued that the parliamentary rule at the center of the case requires a “special case” for a committee to convene during the recess, but that a special case does not necessarily have to be urgent. Payments to suppliers and employees, it said, have previously been treated as special cases even when coalition funding was involved.
The Knesset also argued that the Finance Ministry has traditionally taken the position that the Finance Committee cannot break a single budget request into pieces and approve only selected components.
If the petitioners themselves now accept that some of the transfers approved on August 4 can proceed, the Knesset argued, that weakens their claim that Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana lacked authority to permit the committee meeting in the first place.
That remains the larger legal question before the court.
Hiddush and Lazimi argue that the Finance Committee was unlawfully convened during the election recess after the coalition-opposition Agreements Committee did not approve another meeting.
The Knesset maintains that Ohana had the authority to permit the meeting independently in a “special case,” and has pointed to similar decisions by previous Knesset speakers. The Finance Ministry has separately maintained that the transfers implement government decisions made before the election period and meet the restraint required of a government ahead of an election.
The High Court has not yet ruled on that underlying dispute. Until it does, the NIS 78 million Religious Services Ministry transfer and civil emergency expenditures remain outside the freeze.
The urgent education, local authority and northern and southern recovery funding identified by the petitioners remains blocked pending another court decision, alongside the coalition-linked transfers they continue to challenge.