The High Court of Justice on Sunday ordered the state to take concrete steps within weeks to revoke key financial benefits from draft evaders and to move toward criminal enforcement against ultra-Orthodox (haredi) men who fail to report for military service, in one of the most forceful rulings yet in the long-running battle over haredi conscription.
The five-justice panel, led by Deputy Supreme Court President Noam Sohlberg, gave the state until June 1 to update the court on implementation, both on the economic-civil track and the criminal-enforcement track.
Before then, the Israel Land Council must decide within 21 days how to condition eligibility for subsidized housing programs on resolving one’s draft status. The Labor Ministry must decide within 21 days how to make daycare and afternoon-care subsidies conditional on a parent who was called up having regulated his status with the IDF. Additionally, the finance and transportation ministers were given 35 days to decide whether and how to deny public-transportation discounts to those who have not reported for service, while the interior minister was given the same deadline regarding municipal tax discounts.
The ruling did not merely repeat the court’s earlier demand that the government formulate an enforcement policy. It moved a step further, laying out specific government bodies, specific benefits, and specific deadlines after months in which the court said the state had failed to carry out its previous judgment.
“Since then and until today, no real steps have been taken to implement the judgment,” Sohlberg wrote, in a decision joined by Justices Dafna Barak-Erez, David Mintz, Yael Willner, and Ofer Grosskopf.
The decision came in contempt-of-court applications filed after the state failed to implement the court’s November 2025 ruling, which had ordered the government to develop an effective enforcement policy against haredi draft evasion. That ruling itself followed the court’s June 2024 judgment, which held that without a lawful exemption framework, the executive branch has no authority to refrain from enforcing the Security Service Law - the draft law - against yeshiva students.
IDF’s continuing manpower shortage
The court framed Sunday’s ruling against the background of the war and the IDF’s continuing manpower shortage. Sohlberg recalled that the legal duty to enlist has applied equally to haredi men since the previous exemption arrangement expired in June 2023. Since then, he wrote, Israel had been through a “terrible and difficult war,” with soldiers killed, thousands wounded, reservists losing livelihoods, and families carrying the burden.
Against that backdrop, the court said the law, equality, the urgent security need, and the backs of those carrying the burden were all being trampled by “mass, ongoing and broad” draft evasion.
The justices stressed that they were not creating a new conscription policy. Rather, they said, they were forcing the state to carry out the law that already exists.
The government had argued again that the proper way to resolve haredi conscription was through legislation. The court rejected that as insufficient, noting that the government has been promising a legislative arrangement for years, while no binding framework has been enacted.
The ruling also took aim at the government’s handling of the court’s November order. In January, after the deadline to formulate an economic enforcement policy had already passed, the government decided to form a ministerial team that was supposed to submit recommendations within 30 days. Those recommendations were not submitted, and the court said no alternative effective enforcement steps had been presented.
The justices emphasized that the benefits at issue are not vested rights but state benefits. Revoking them, the court said, is not a punishment but the denial of public benefits to those who have failed to meet a legal obligation.
The court also warned against bypass mechanisms, saying that any attempt to create alternative funding channels for those who lose benefits would directly contradict the judgment.
Draft evader numbers stand at 76,000
On the criminal side, the court left its November order in place but sharpened its criticism of enforcement. According to state data cited in the decision, roughly 76,000 draft-age men have been declared draft evaders or are under draft orders, about 80% of them haredi. Yet between January 2025 and January 2026, only 17 haredi draft evaders were arrested through proactive Military Police operations. Of 442 indictments filed against draft evaders in 2025, only 81 were filed against haredi men; and, in January and February 2026, only seven of 96 indictments were filed against haredi men.
The court said those numbers were deeply troubling and reflected a tiny level of enforcement compared with the scale of the violation.
The justices were particularly critical of police policy, after the state said police were still not detaining draft evaders during ordinary encounters and were not assisting the Military Police in proactive arrest operations in haredi population centers, in part because of concerns over disorder and manpower shortages.
Sohlberg wrote that police discretion over enforcement priorities does not allow “complete avoidance” of using legal powers. The police, he said, must assist military enforcement authorities and begin enforcing the draft obligation against haredi evaders.
The ruling drew immediate praise from petitioners, who said the court had finally forced the state to move from declarations to implementation.
Israel Hofsheet, which led the contempt petition over failure to enforce the draft law and impose sanctions on evaders, called the decision “dramatic and precedent-setting,” saying the court had sent a clear message that enlistment must be enforced and that millions of shekels in public benefits cannot continue flowing to draft evaders.
The organization said the decision was built on previous legal victories, including the cancellation of National Insurance discounts and the suspension of other funding channels, and showed that “the law and the public that serves can no longer be ignored.”
The Movement for Quality Government, also a petitioner in the case, said the ruling confirmed what should have been obvious: that the government must obey the court’s judgment and enforce the draft law equally.
The movement accused the government of “whistling past the law” and abandoning soldiers, saying the court had been forced to intervene with immediate operative steps because the government had failed to act on its own.
Sunday’s decision now places the issue back before the government, but with far less room to maneuver. If ministers adopt concrete measures consistent with the ruling, the court indicated it would step back. If not, the June 1 update could become the next flashpoint in a case that has already moved from the legality of exemptions, to funding, to enforcement, and now to the question of whether the state will carry out binding court orders during wartime.