Former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Shas party leader Aryeh Deri jousted on social media Sunday over the mob attack earlier in the day against two female IDF servicewomen in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak.
While Bennett accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of ignoring ultra-Orthodox incitement as part of the community’s campaign against being drafted into the army, Deri panned Bennett as a political opportunist trying to take advantage of the incident and called on police to remove him from the city.
Bennett visited Bnei Brak after the two soldiers had been extracted by police amid violent rioting.
Filming a video of himself on the streets, he declared, “This is what happens when people sense that draft evasion is winning.”
“This didn’t happen in a vacuum; there is an address for this behavior. Netanyahu and the Haredi parties, what did you think would happen? You turned a blind eye to the cries of ‘We will die rather than enlist.’ What did you think would happen? What did you think would happen when you ignored the violence directed at Haredi soldiers who do enlist?” Bennett asked in the clip that he posted to social media.
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In response, Deri called on police to “immediately issue a restraining order” to remove Bennett from the city, although there was unlikely any legal basis for his demand.
“This inciter and instigator arrived in the city with the aim of inflaming passions and exploiting this painful situation to gain votes for himself. This despicable man, who does not care about anything, is the last person who should be at the scene,” Deri declared in a statement posted to his X account.
Responding in a post, Bennett said, “The problem is not Deri, who has gotten used to being the owner of the country, but Netanyahu, who sold it to him.”
בני ברק, עכשיו.
נתניהו והחרדים העלימו עין מקריאות “נמות ולא נתגייס״ ועודדו השתמטות ממוסדת.
ככה זה נראה כשההשתמטות מנצחת. pic.twitter.com/KuB1D5whoj
— Naftali Bennett נפתלי בנט (@naftalibennett) February 15, 2026
“When Deri calls on healthy young Haredi men not to dare to enlist to help IDF soldiers, Netanyahu is silent, supportive, and promotes a conscription law that abandons our soldiers,” Bennett said.
In response, Deri’s Shas party accused the former premier of selling out Israel to Arab politician Mansour Abbas “in exchange for the prime minister’s seat.”
The Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government, which was in office from 2021 to 2022, made history by including the Islamist Ra’am party, led by Abbas, in its coalition of right-wing, centrist, and left-wing parties.
“Your cynical exploitation of IDF soldiers and bereaved families is no less grave than your arrival in Bnei Brak to profit from the rifts you created. It seems there is no depth you won’t stoop to,” the Shas statement added.
In a follow-up post, Bennett declared that “an independent Haredi state has been set up here that is not subject to Israeli law,” and is funded by the rest of Israel’s citizens.
“All this is happening because Netanyahu is completely dependent on the good graces of Deri and [Yitzhak] Goldknopf,” he added, referring to the head of the Shas-allied ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party.
“He is tired and weak and surrenders to them at every juncture,” said Bennett, a hawkish politician who is widely seen as Netanyahu’s primary challenger for the premiership in this year’s Knesset election.
Two female IDF soldiers are rescued by police after being chased by a mob in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak on February 15, 2026. (Screenshots/David Keshet/X)
The ambush of the two soldiers and subsequent riots in Bnei Brak received across-the-board condemnation, including from Haredi politicians and spiritual leaders, who warned that the incident might damage the community’s anti-conscription efforts.
Goldknopf said he was shocked by the footage and called the violence “contrary to the Torah.”
Deri said the incident stood to “harm the entire Haredi public, cause a desecration of God’s name, and inflict heavy damage on the righteous struggle for the Torah world.”
For the past two years, the Haredi leadership has pushed for a law keeping its constituency out of the IDF, after the High Court ruled that decades-long blanket exemptions from army duty traditionally afforded to full-time Haredi yeshiva students were illegal.
Since then, coalition lawmakers, dependent on Haredi support to keep them in government, have struggled to find a formulation that could win ultra-Orthodox backing while also meeting widespread demands for the community to share in the burden of mandatory military service.
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