Disturbances occurred when protesters attempted to block vehicles by lying on the roadway in Kiryat Ono, Israel Police said.

Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) protesters took to the streets on Sunday, demonstrating against the IDF enlistment day, recruiting haredi conscripts into combat units in Israel’s military.

Clashes broke out between police officers and haredi protesters outside the Jerusalem recruitment office, while an illegal demonstration also took place near the IDF recruitment office in Kiryat Ono, blocking the entrance to the Tel Hashomer military base.

Disturbances occurred when protesters attempted to block vehicles by lying on the roadway in Kiryat Ono, Israel Police said.

A haredi protester said “recruitment offices are like extermination ovens to us,” when speaking to Kan News outside of the Tel Hashomer base.

He added that the offices are places “where hundreds and thousands entered wearing a kippah, tzitzit, and keeping Shabbat and mitzvot, and tens of percent left without them [...] we will continue to fight until the rule of evil is overturned.”

Police clash with Haredi protesters at recruitment centers

Head of the IDF’s personnel planning branch, Brig.-Gen. Shai Tayeb updated the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee at the end of the recruitment day that there was an increase in the number of ultra-Orthodox recruits who enlisted.

“As of noon, there were over 210 combat soldiers and more than 140 combat support personnel, and it appears that within about 10 days this will conclude with the largest enlistment in recent years,” he said.

The protests came during a full day of meetings on the haredi draft law at the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, continuing into the evening.

Criticism of the new outline of the bill that was presented by Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairperson MK Boaz Bismuth (Likud) argue that it fails to enforce haredi conscription, stalls time, and is a political solution that attempts to appease the haredi parties to return to the government after they resigned in protest of an earlier version of the bill in July.

Meanwhile, the IDF has repeatedly warned that it urgently lacks manpower in combat units, especially after over two years of war.

The meetings on Sunday focused, for the first time, on the sanctions section for draft evaders, which has been widely criticized as far too lenient and ineffective in enforcing conscription to the IDF in Bismuth’s revised version.

United Torah Judaism (TUJ) chairperson Yitzhak Goldknopf sparked outrage for comparing enforcing yeshiva students’ conscription to the military to “placing a yellow badge on them,” in remarks at the panel.

“I beg you, exempt them from everything,” he told the panel, before seeming to refer to the yellow star that Nazi’s placed on Jews during the Holocaust.

“They should not be tied to quotas or targets,” Goldknopf said about yeshiva students.

“In what country in the world do they take a rabbi and punish him? And here in Israel, we would decide to punish them? A yellow badge, how can we do such a thing?” Goldknopf told the panel.

The comments sparked outrage among politicians from both Israel’s opposition and coalition.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) asked, “How dare you? My father wore a yellow badge in the Budapest ghetto simply because there was no Jewish army to protect his life. My grandfather wore a yellow badge when he was murdered in a concentration camp.”

“What you said today in the committee is the dream of every antisemite, both a debasement of the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and a show of contempt for the IDF and its soldiers,” Lapid added.

Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikili said, “I’ve encountered disconnected politicians before, but Goldknopf is truly in a league of his own.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party) said that it was good that Goldknopf was no longer part of the coalition. “As appears, he’s also not expected to return,” Smotrich added.

“There is no place in our coalition for disconnected and obtuse people who don’t stop harming the people of Israel, IDF fighters, and Torah scholars,” the finance minister said.