Addressing the government during its weekly meeting on Sunday, Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs told ministers that the government’s ultra-Orthodox draft regulation bill could be sent to the Knesset plenum in the next few weeks, paving the way for the final two votes before the controversial legislation becomes law.

But despite the backing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the future of the bill — which introduces measures aimed at increasing military conscription among members of the Haredi community but ultimately enshrines continued exemptions for full-time yeshiva students — is still very much up in the air.

In the end, its fate, and potentially that of Netanyahu’s government, is likely to rest on three groups: the Knesset’s ultra-Orthodox parties, the far-right Religious Zionism party, and a small group of Likud rebels who have expressed public opposition to a measure they and other critics believe will be ineffective in increasing Haredi conscription to any meaningful degree.

Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted. The Israel Defense Forces has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits due to the strain on standing and reserve forces caused by the war against Hamas in Gaza and other military challenges.

For the past two years, the Haredi leadership has pushed for a law keeping its constituency out of the IDF, after the High Court ruled that decades-long blanket exemptions from army duty traditionally afforded to full-time Haredi yeshiva students were illegal. Since then, coalition lawmakers, dependent on Haredi support to keep them in government, have struggled to find a formulation that could win ultra-Orthodox backing while also meeting demands for the community to share in the burden of mandatory military service.

The latest version of the bill, introduced by Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth (Likud) has come under fire from IDF brass, the attorney general, and a wide array of other critics, who have objected to it on the grounds that it is full of loopholes and will not increase Haredi enlistment.

Among them are a small but significant number of coalition MKs who have vocally pilloried the bill, including Likud MKs Yuli Edelstein and Dan Illouz, New Hope’s Sharren Haskel and Religious Zionism’s Moshe Solomon, Michal Woldiger and Ofir Sofer.

Sofer, who also serves as immigration minister, held a press conference last month to announce that he would “vote against this law, even if it means the prime minister will fire me.”

The........

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