Israeli soldiers respond to an alert of an apparent security incident, in Ashkelon, southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

The Military Police knew which flight the Chabad students were on. Forty-two of them landed at Ben Gurion Airport last Tuesday morning, and there were soldiers waiting at the gate. Twenty-seven agreed to enlist within hours. Thirteen more refused, went to military custody, and signed by the evening. The two whose orders had gone unanswered for more than 540 days went to prison.

Forty out of 42, in a day.

The state’s own update to the High Court, filed on Wednesday, shows how rarely it gets that far anywhere else. Gali Baharav-Miara’s office puts the number of men declared draft evaders or placed under what the army calls an Order 12 at 110,330 as of Sept. 8. The army reckons about 81 percent of them are Haredi. Between July 1 and Oct. 12, the IDF and the police ran no planned arrest operations at all. A joint operation scheduled for this month has now been postponed twice, because the police asked for hundreds of soldiers to hold the street and the army answered that holding the street is the police’s job. Which means, really, that the arrests become accidental.

A patrol stops a young man for something else, finds he is an evader, and calls the Military Police (who have just half an hour under the joint procedure to come and collect him.) In more than 140 cases since July, they didn’t come, and he went home with a note telling him to report to the recruitment office. Police arrested 14 people that way between July and mid-October. Last Tuesday morning, while one team waited at the airport, five yeshiva students stopped at the Ein Zeitim junction were let go when the 30 minutes ran out.

The prosecutors aren’t filling the gap. Between January and Oct. 6, 419 indictments were filed against declared evaders, and military prosecutors estimate that 51 of them were against Haredim. Four in five evaders, one in eight cases.

And the cheapest lever is still sitting in a drawer. The High Court gave the government 45 days in November 2025 to adopt a policy of economic sanctions on evaders, which ran out on Jan. 4. According to the filing, the Finance Ministry’s professionals have finished their review of withdrawing property-tax and public-transport discounts, and neither step needs a new law. The government hasn’t adopted either one.

Haredi men can serve, and the army has built the places for them to do it. Last Tuesday, while the Chabad students were landing, 15 cadets of the Hashmonaim Brigade got their commissions up on the Western Wall Yeshiva’s roof, the Haredi brigade’s first officers’ course, eight months long with operations in Lebanon and Judea and Samaria inside it. The next course opens in November. The 2025 draft year brought in 4,298 Haredi men, up from 2,811 the year before.

Of the 79,835 Haredi men in the 2024 and 2025 draft cohorts, 11,283 reported to the induction process and 4,026 have been inducted. Another 48,278 were declared evaders. That movement, however, is smaller than the numbers appear. Many of the people counted as Haredi for those stats are no longer truly haredi — having left their community or families.

Israel votes on Oct. 27, and none of those figures will move by then. Whatever coalition, if any this time around, gets to 61 seats takes over 110,330 men, a half-hour pickup window the army misses more often than it meets, and a sanctions policy the Treasury has already worked up.

United Torah Judaism has asked the chairman of the Central Elections Committee to suspend arrests until the vote is over. The Haredi parties will put a bigger version of that request to every coalition that needs them, and whichever one forms will have to answer it with the reservists still carrying the load.

Last Tuesday showed how little it takes. The army knew which plane to meet, it met it, and 40 men signed. What the next government decides is whether the state turns up anywhere else.

Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute. The Mitzpe Institute, an educational program of the Atlanta Israel Coalition, publishes the Israel Brief for more than 10,000 subscribers in more than 95 countries, and has five books in print from Mitzpe Press, with No More Alibis forthcoming under its Guerre and Shalom imprint.