The High Court of Justice unanimously struck down on Thursday a law shielding haredi (ultra-Orthodox) yeshiva students from arrest, investigation, and other proceedings over draft evasion, finding that the coalition had used a fundamentally defective legislative process to deprive the IDF of central enforcement tools.
Eight of the nine justices went further, ruling that the law’s substance was also unconstitutional because it protected one group from criminal enforcement while leaving its members’ legal obligation to report for military service intact.
The law never took effect. Justice Ofer Grosskopf froze it on July 15, one day after it passed, and the full nine-justice panel maintained that freeze following a hearing later that month.
Thursday’s ruling makes that outcome permanent. The existing draft-enforcement regime remains in place, although the judgment does not direct the IDF to make particular arrests or resolve the broader political dispute over haredi military service.
Deputy Supreme Court President Noam Sohlberg, who authored the principal opinion, found with the agreement of the entire panel that the law enacted by the Knesset was fundamentally different from the bill that had passed its first reading.
High Court strikes down haredi draft enforcement freeze
The original 2022 bill sought to increase haredi participation in military and national service, facilitate entry into employment, and reduce inequality in the distribution of the security burden.
What ultimately emerged in July 2026 was a temporary measure suspending enforcement against eligible yeshiva students who had failed to report for service. It contained no enlistment targets, effective sanctions, or alternative mechanism for bringing those students into the military.
Under Section 85 of the Knesset Rules of Procedure, a committee may substantially amend a bill as it progresses, but it may not introduce an entirely “new subject” that was never approved at the first-reading stage.
The change was so complete, Sohlberg found, that the final law could not legally be regarded as having passed a first reading at all. That defect went to the root of the legislative process and required the law’s annulment.
The conclusion, he stressed, did not come “like a bolt from the blue.”
The Knesset’s legal advisers had “faithfully performed their work” and warned lawmakers “once, twice, and three times” that the proposed measure could not be treated as a continuation of the original bill, Sohlberg wrote.
“The members of Knesset did not heed the good advice they received,” he added, describing the case as nowhere near the legal borderline.
The Knesset’s own legal team ultimately told the court that the process was fundamentally defective. Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara agreed and also argued that the law created a discriminatory system of criminal enforcement.
The government, despite receiving permission to obtain separate representation, did not mount a legal defense of the law. Its short submission said that the result of the proceedings was “known in advance” and focused instead on the claim that arrests could damage efforts to increase haredi enlistment.
Sohlberg said the absence of a defense was telling, suggesting that even those responsible for the law had not sincerely believed it was constitutional when it was passed.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir had also warned lawmakers before the vote that the measure would incentivize eligible men not to report and was “clearly and unequivocally inconsistent with the IDF’s needs.”
The law formally preserved the obligation to enlist but prevented authorities from enforcing it against qualifying yeshiva students. Applicants could receive immediate protection by submitting affidavits stating that they met the law’s Torah-study requirements, before the military committee established under the law had examined their eligibility.
Eight justices held that this created an unconstitutional distinction both in the enforcement of criminal law and in the distribution of the military burden.
“The enforcement proceedings against members of the haredi public in this context are conducted because they evaded their military-service obligation - not, heaven forbid, because they study Torah,” Sohlberg wrote.
He found that the law removed some of the IDF’s principal enforcement tools without creating any meaningful alternative and did so exclusively for members of one sector.
Figures submitted to the court also undermined the government’s description of an extensive wave of arrests. Of an estimated 73,664 haredi draft evaders, 219 - approximately 0.3% - had been arrested through the enforcement channels examined in the judgment.
Justice David Mintz joined the unanimous decision to strike the law down because of the legislative defect but did not join the substantive constitutional ruling. He reiterated his position that the court does not have the authority to annul ordinary legislation because of its content.
The remaining panel members were justices Dafna Barak-Erez, Yael Willner, Grosskopf, Alex Stein, Gila Canfy-Steinitz, Yechiel Kasher, and Ruth Ronnen.
The ruling follows a succession of increasingly forceful judgments concerning haredi enlistment.
In June 2024, a nine-justice panel unanimously ruled that, after the statutory framework allowing deferments for yeshiva students expired, the government had no authority to refrain from drafting them or to continue funding institutions for students required to serve.
The court returned to the issue in November 2025, ordering the government to formulate an effective policy combining meaningful criminal enforcement with economic and civil measures. It described the government’s conduct as approaching a complete abandonment of enforcement.
After finding that those instructions had not been implemented, the court issued further orders in April requiring ministries and public bodies to consider restricting benefits available to draft evaders.
Shas: Justices are greatest chaos generators in country
The law struck down on Thursday would have suspended the same enforcement mechanisms the court had repeatedly ordered the government to strengthen.
Shas responded by calling the justices “the greatest generators of chaos in the country.” The party argued that arrests would not add soldiers to the IDF and accused the court of seeking to deepen social divisions and intervene in the election campaign.
Earlier Thursday, in an interview with Kol Barama that preceded the ruling, Shas chairman Arye Deri said he did not need to call on haredi men who were not studying Torah to enlist. He claimed that the IDF did not want haredi soldiers and preferred “a secular army.”
The judgment also returned to an exchange during the July hearing in which attorney Natan Rosenblatt, representing a haredi organization that sought to join the case, argued that the Torah prohibited enlistment under the existing conditions.
“I simply cannot believe what I am hearing,” Mintz, himself observant, responded. When Rosenblatt invoked “all the great rabbis of Israel,” Mintz interrupted: “Not all the great rabbis of Israel. You are speaking in sectoral terms.”
Sohlberg, an observant justice and graduate of the Har Etzion hesder yeshiva, devoted the closing section of his opinion to that religious argument.
“With the signing of another chapter - as bleak as those before it - in the saga of haredi enlistment, and precisely ‘out of recognition of the value of Torah study’ and the Torah’s values, I cannot refrain from what has nearly become a fixed ritual: trying to make clear, to anyone willing to listen, that this is not the way of Torah. Far from it,” he wrote.
He cited the biblical question posed by Moses to the tribes that sought to remain east of the Jordan: “Shall your brothers go to war while you sit here?”
Sohlberg concluded with an unsigned letter published during the 1948 War of Independence and sometimes attributed to Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin.
“Is this the measure - that those engaged in Torah should not be obliged to save themselves, but should stand aside and place the duty of saving them upon others?” the letter asked.
“Let the students of Torah participate in the campaign, and the merit of Torah will protect them and their comrades.”