Female artillery soldiers were told to leave the area where they were stationed during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to southern Lebanon on Tuesday in order to prevent them from encountering Haredi soldiers from the IDF’s Hasmonean Brigade, according to a report aired Wednesday by Kan News.
Netanyahu visited southern Lebanon with Defense Minister Israel Katz. According to the report, female soldiers from the Artillery Corps were moved from the site before Netanyahu met soldiers from the Hasmonean Brigade, a new ultra-Orthodox combat framework established for Haredi troops.
The mother of one of the female soldiers said the women had been working at the same location ahead of the visit.
“When Bibi had to arrive to meet the Hasmoneans at the position they had worked on, the girls in the battery were told that they had promised the Hasmoneans they would not see girls there, and therefore they had to go to another house and stay downstairs,” she said.
The mother added that the female soldiers remained there for four hours.
“For four hours, only the girls from the battery sat downstairs and were not allowed to go upstairs, so the Hasmoneans would not accidentally run into them,” she said.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said in response: “This was a gathering that was not properly planned in relation to the existing conditions at the brigade commander’s house in enemy territory. The incident will be investigated.”
The incident joins a series of recent cases reported by ynet involving the exclusion of women in the IDF, especially around the integration of religious and Haredi soldiers into combat frameworks.
In May, ynet reported that reservists from Brigade 679 objected to a deputy battalion commander’s decision to add a female reservist combat soldier to a medical evacuation force. According to testimony received by ynet, two soldiers left training ahead of entry into Lebanon, and another said he would not report for duty because of the decision.
In April, ynet reported that an operational activity planned by Yahalom, the IDF’s elite combat engineering unit, was canceled on the same day because female soldiers from the unit were not allowed to enter an outpost where Haredi soldiers from the Hasmonean Brigade were serving.
Last month, against the backdrop of the first female soldier being integrated into Sayeret Matkal, ynet reported that Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, head of the Bnei David pre-military academy in the West Bank settlement of Eli, called on students from pre-military academies and yeshivas not to enlist in the elite unit. He said it had become a “mixed unit” that did not meet halachic requirements for observant soldiers.
The latest incident also comes after 257 current and former female IDF officers sent a letter in late June to IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, Defense Minister Israel Katz and Defense Ministry Director-General Amir Baram, warning of what they called an “anti-women wave against female combat soldiers and women in the IDF.”
In the letter, the officers urged the military and political leadership to stop what they described as “the takeover of the IDF by foreign elements,” and warned of damage to the chain of command.
The officers also addressed calls by rabbis against mixed service, calling them “de facto calls for refusal” and “a blatant attempt to dictate a civilian agenda to the IDF at the expense of operational needs.”
They argued that “the silence of the senior command in the face of this dangerous interference in force assignments constitutes grave harm to national security and to the authority of commanders in the field.”
The officers demanded an official order of the day and a binding command clarification on mixed service, along with “zero tolerance toward hesder yeshiva rabbis and commanders who cooperate with the exclusion of women in the field.”
They also called on the defense minister and the Defense Ministry director-general to reexamine service arrangements with yeshivas that they said effectively encourage disobedience to the military chain of command.