“The army doesn’t want haredi soldiers, get that into your head,” said Deri, adding that the idea of ultra-Orthodox soldiers gives the IDF “a very big headache.”
Deri added that he doesn’t need to call on haredim to enlist, saying he will “let the army deal with it.”
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, chairman of the Together party, responded to Deri’s comments later on Thursday, saying that the Shas chairman is “harming IDF soldiers.”
“They were afraid that if they woke the prime minister, I would activate the air force, and I would wake the entire IDF, and I would not let anyone get close to the fences – because we would kill them immediately,” Netanyahu claimed. “If they had woken me, everything would have looked different.”