Israel issues more than 1,000 arrest warrants for ultra-Orthodox draft avoiders

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Israel’s military has issued 1,126 arrest warrants for ultra-Orthodox conscripts who have not responded to drafting orders, in a move likely to fuel discontent over a controversial decision to remove their decades-long exemption from service.

Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb announced the arrest warrants to a parliamentary committee Tuesday, saying that conscripts who had ignored their orders would initially be called and reminded of their duty.

Those who continued not to cooperate, he said, would be summoned immediately or risk being declared a draft dodger – after which they would be banned from foreign travel and risk arrest if stopped by police.

The move is likely to fuel the discontent that has roiled the country since a Supreme Court ruling in June that ultra-Orthodox Jews could not be exempt from military service, as they have been since the founding of Israel.

Israel has turned to enlisting ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) Jews of draft age after more than a year of war in Gaza and a ground operation in Lebanon that has strained its military, but the move has been deeply unpopular with a community on whose support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relies for his governing coalition.

Since the Supreme Court ruling, Israeli authorities have sent out 3,000 draft orders to ultra-Orthodox Jews and new Defense Minister Israel Katz said last week he would send out an additional 7,000 orders that were approved by his predecessor Yoav Gallant before he was fired two weeks ago.

However, in his comments Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Tayib cautioned that even 10,000 ultra-Orthodox conscripts might not be enough.

“The IDF is in need of soldiers. We touched on the figure of 10,000, but this isn’t a stable figure because we have casualties unfortunately,” he said.

Content retrieved from: https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/19/middleeast/israel-arrest-warrants-ultra-orthodox-draft-intl-latam/index.html.

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