The Israel Defence Forces have issued more than eleven hundred arrest warrants to ultra-Orthodox Jews who have ignored draft orders, a senior army officer told Knesset members on Wednesday.
The Times of Israel has reported that the head of the IDF’s Personnel Directorate’s Planning and Personnel Management Division explained that the army issued 3,000 draft orders to members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community over the summer, but many of them did not show up.
“Of the 3,000 ultra-Orthodox who received [draft] orders,” General Shay Taib told members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, “1,126 were issued with arrest warrants for those who did not report to the first and second orders. After that, they will receive a call for immediate recruitment, and anyone who does not come [to the induction centre] will be declared a [draft dodger].”
In Israel, draft dodgers receive a “no exit order” banning them from leaving the country and they face being arrested.
The Israeli Military Police do not plan to actually carry out arrests of those who do not show up to the induction centres, but instead wait until they are declared draft dodgers and leave it to law enforcement officers.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has called on Defence Minister Yisrael Katz to direct the army to issue 7,000 additional draft orders immediately to ultra-Orthodox Jews of military service age, and to step up measures against those who do not show up for service.
The army said that it needs 10,000 new soldiers for combat operations, but would not be able to recruit more than 3,000 ultra-Orthodox soldiers this year due to their “additional needs”.
The army already drafts around 1,800 ultra-Orthodox Jews annually. The figures would mean only 4,800 out of more than 60,000 eligible ultra-Orthodox men would be conscripted, a number that committee chair and Likud MK Yuli Edelstein has long dismissed as insufficient.