A political storm erupted Sunday after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a briefing on the law freezing the arrests of haredi draft evaders.
The briefing, which claimed the legislation was originally intended to calm tensions but had "failed" and therefore would not be advanced by the next government, sparked a wave of sharp reactions.
At a Sunday evening meeting of the Degel HaTorah faction, the party's MKs chose to remain deliberately silent and refrained from issuing an official response to the briefings.
Behind the scenes, however, party officials said the move was a fundamentally flawed election strategy by Likud that had only returned the issue of haredi military service to the center of public debate and ultimately harmed Netanyahu himself.
"This is something they brought upon themselves," Behadrey Haredim quoted party officials as saying. "A response would only fan the flames."
Unlike Degel HaTorah's silence, United Torah Judaism chairman MK Yitzhak Goldknopf openly criticized Netanyahu, claiming that these remarks confirmed what his party had believed from the outset - that the Prime Minister's Office never had any genuine intention of resolving the status of yeshiva students or passing meaningful draft legislation. This, he claimed, justifies UTJ's decision to leave the government.