The interim order keeps pressure on the government as Israel’s courts, lawmakers and military confront one of the country’s most divisive equality questions. A final ruling is expected soon.
The High Court maintained a freeze on a law limiting enforcement against haredi draft dodgers. The ruling followed a hearing and was issued on Tuesday in Israel. A final ruling is expected soon. The interim order came from a nine-justice panel on July 28, 2026, after the High Court heard arguments over whether the government may limit arrests, investigations and prosecutions of eligible ultra-Orthodox men who fail to report for military service.
For Israel, the dispute lands at the intersection of law, religion, military manpower and equal treatment. The immediate effect is simple: the law remains suspended until the court issues its judgment.
The freeze stays in place
The High Court of Justice said it was issuing an interim order after considering written and oral arguments from the parties, according to The Jerusalem Post’s account of the proceedings. The order suspends the law’s entry into force until a further decision.
The court’s language was brief but consequential. It left the enforcement-limiting law on hold and signaled that the justices expect to move quickly, saying the judgment will be issued soon.
The law at issue would restrict enforcement measures against eligible haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, men who do not report for military service. In practical terms, critics say it would blunt the state’s ability to impose consequences on one category of draft evaders while others remain exposed to enforcement.
That distinction is the core of the case. The question is not only whether the state can draft ultra-Orthodox men, but whether it can maintain a duty to enlist while shielding a specific sector from the tools normally used to enforce that duty.
How the law reached court
The Knesset passed the enforcement-freeze law on July 14. One day later, Justice Ofer Grosskopf froze it after five petitions were filed against the measure.
Those petitions included challenges from opposition faction heads Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid and Avigdor Liberman of Yisrael Beytenu, according to The Jerusalem Post. Other petitioners also argued that the law undermined equality before the law and the existing legal framework around military service.
Grosskopf’s initial decision focused on two major issues: the court’s longstanding rulings on yeshiva students’ enlistment and the unequal treatment the law appeared to grant to only certain sections of the population.
That framing matters because the case is not being treated as a narrow administrative dispute. It has become a constitutional test of how far lawmakers can go in changing enforcement rules when those rules affect one of Israel’s most politically sensitive social divides.
The attorney-general’s warning
Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara asked the court to strike down the law, arguing that it preserves the duty to enlist while removing the consequences for refusing to do so.
Her position cast the law as a selective shield. She described it as a “group immunity mechanism” that protects one sector from arrest, investigation and prosecution while leaving other draft evaders subject to the full force of the law.
That argument goes directly to equal enforcement. If two eligible citizens both fail to report, the petitioners and attorney-general are effectively asking whether the state may restrain enforcement against one group because of its communal or religious identity.
Supporters of limits on enforcement tend to frame the issue differently. They argue that mass coercion of haredi men is socially explosive, religiously fraught and unlikely to produce sustainable enlistment without broader political compromise.
Knesset lawyers raised process concerns
The Knesset’s own legal advisers did not focus only on the broad constitutional dispute. Their position, filed before the hearing, centered on flaws in the way the law was enacted.
Attorney Yitzhak Bart, representing the Knesset’s legal advisers in court, said committees have broad authority to amend bills as long as they do not introduce a “new subject.” That rule allows lawmakers to improve legislation without restarting the process every time a bill changes.
But Bart argued that this law crossed the line. He distinguished between a bill meant to integrate yeshiva students into military service and a law that freezes enforcement measures against those who fail to report.
He described the Knesset legal advisers’ conclusion that procedural defects required annulment as extremely rare. That makes this case unusual: even the institution that passed the law is facing an internal legal critique over how the measure was transformed.
Religious claims met pushback
The hearing also put the religious argument for non-enlistment in sharp relief. Attorney Natan Rosenblatt, representing the haredi Emet L’Yaakov organization as it sought to join the proceedings, argued that a haredi man could not enlist because the Torah forbids him from doing so.
Justice David Mintz pushed back forcefully, saying he could not believe what he was hearing. When Rosenblatt said that all the great rabbis of Israel opposed enlistment under current circumstances, Mintz interrupted and said not all great rabbis held that position, calling the claim sectoral.
The exchange showed why the issue has resisted easy resolution. For many haredi leaders and families, full-time Torah study is not a lifestyle preference but a central religious obligation. For many other Israelis, especially those who serve or have children in uniform, exemptions and enforcement gaps look like a civic burden shifted onto everyone else.
That divide has only sharpened as Israel continues to rely heavily on military service. Any ruling that strengthens enforcement could trigger political backlash in haredi communities; any ruling that permits selective enforcement limits could deepen resentment among those who see equal service as a basic democratic demand.
What happens next
The government’s own filing added another layer of tension. According to The Jerusalem Post, the government submitted a two-page position saying it had declined to hire a private attorney to defend the law because the outcome of the case was “known in advance.”
Rather than fully answer the petitions, the filing accused the court of violating separation of powers and criticized the Attorney-General’s Office, which the government said was obstructing efforts to increase haredi enlistment.
That leaves the justices with several possible paths. They could strike down the law on constitutional equality grounds, invalidate it because of legislative process defects, or issue a narrower ruling that keeps the current freeze while clarifying what the Knesset may do next.
Until the final judgment arrives, the operative result is unchanged: the law limiting enforcement against eligible haredi men remains frozen. The bigger unresolved question is whether Israel’s political system can craft a durable enlistment policy that courts will uphold and enough citizens will view as fair.
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