A Haredi demonstration in Jerusalem against military service devolved into violence on Thursday when hundreds of young men lingered after the mass prayer rally’s official end and clashed with Border Police officers.
Despite the emcee’s exhortation that demonstrators disperse calmly, large crowds remained near the Route 1 entrance to Jerusalem, after a 200,000-strong rally at which some reporters were assaulted and a young man fell to his death from an unfinished building.
Mounted officers and a water cannon were deployed to clear out the protesters. Police said it reopened Route 1, the main highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and detained several rioters who tossed stones and hurled barricades at officers.
Trains also resumed from the nearby Yitzhak Navon station, according to Israel Railways, but Channel 12 reported that protesters were still blocking the Jerusalem light rail.
Overall, 74 people, including the deceased young man, required treatment during the rally, medics said.
At least three officers were wounded, the Ynet news site reported. In one case, footage showed an officer brandishing his gun and waving it in the ear as he escorted his wounded colleague away from the protesters.
Officers in full riot gear charged one group that tried to force their way back into the construction site where Menachem Mendel Litzman, 20, fell to his death in what police were probing as a potential suicide. Officers also removed a group that had barricaded itself on a nearby crane.
Separately, a pair of Haredi soldiers who hoisted a sign supporting detained Haredi yeshiva students were attacked by protesters and had to be rescued by police, the newspaper said.
Yosef Goffman, a yeshiva student from Jerusalem who attended the rally on Thursday, told The Times of Israel that he was saddened by the event’s tragic conclusion and the subsequent scuffles with police.
Goffman said he typically refrains from partaking in anti-draft demonstrations, but attended the Thursday rally because it was endorsed by the ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset, as opposed to the more radical Jerusalem Faction.
The rally, one of the largest displays of unity of the Haredi community in recent years, brought together disparate factions that do not often mingle with each other.
Haaretz quoted a rally-goer who attended with his young son as saying: “I contribute to the state by volunteering for rescue and police forces, so I prefer not to state my opinion on the enlistment issue. But the rabbis said to come, so I came.”
The protest was organized in response to the crackdown on ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, draft dodgers in recent months, during which time there have been over 870 arrests, amounting to just 7% of the 6,975 Haredi men who have been declared draft dodgers.
The fight over the conscription of military-aged men has become a point of contention over the last two years, ever since the clause in the Law for Security Service, which granted blanket military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, expired in June 2023.
The following year, the High Court ruled that the government was therefore obligated to begin drafting them.
Despite the ruling, very few yeshiva students have enlisted since then, and the government has yet to pass a law regulating Haredi conscription, fearing that doing so will lead to the collapse of the coalition due to fierce opposition from the two Haredi Knesset parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism.
But the IDF has said it needs 12,000 additional combat soldiers, due to the country’s heightened security needs and the deaths and injuries of thousands of soldiers since the Gaza war was sparked by the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023.
