JERUSALEM: Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties, already at odds with coalition partners over demands to draft young religious men into the army, are again testing the unity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with a challenge over education funding.
The latest rift centers on an ultra-Orthodox push for schools in their separate education system to receive the same benefits as state-run schools, especially their “New Horizon” program that adds school hours and sharply hikes teacher pay.
“For a year we have been fighting for the entry of ‘New Horizon’ into ultra-Orthodox institutions. There is no reason for our teachers to be discriminated against,” said ultra-Orthodox Education Minister Haim Biton.
Biton, a member of Shas, one of two Orthodox parties in the right-wing coalition, said they would not quit the government over the issue. But the other ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism (UTJ), notified the coalition whip that until the funding issue was resolved it would boycott votes in parliament.
Coalition whip Ophir Katz said he was working to avert a showdown ahead of a vote on a 3.4 billion shekel ($918.35 million) budget boost to help fund tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from their homes by rocket fire from Lebanon.
The dispute is the latest of many that have highlighted both the tensions within Netanyahu’s unwieldy coalition through almost two years of near-constant crisis punctuated by mass protests against judicial reforms and the Gaza war.
With a grouping of religious and hard-line nationalist-religious parties and his own right-wing Likud party, Netanyahu controls 64 of parliament’s 120 seats but from the start, relations between ministers have been fractious.
Far-right parties led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have repeatedly shaken the coalition over issues including the handling of the Gaza war, threatening to leave over any move, backed by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, toward a deal to end the conflict.
The ultra-Orthodox parties have been less vocal about the conduct of the war but have fought hard for benefits for their Haredi community, who comprise around 13 percent of the population.
Tensions have run especially high over the recent abolition of an exemption long enjoyed by Haredi men from conscription into the military under a ruling by the Supreme Court, but the education budget has also caused problems.
“The Haredi parties feel that the extreme right secured all of its demands from the government and Ben-Gvir gets whatever he wants from the prime minister, while they are failing,” said Gilad Malach, director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s ultra-Orthodox program.
With Netanyahu’s government likely to face a reckoning at the polls over the security failures that allowed the Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas from Gaza to happen, none of the parties have shown any real inclination to walk out.
But even so, such tensions contain the seeds of future problems, Malach said. “It might begin a process that all parties don’t want right now but that might be the result.”

GENEVA: Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes, and world powers need to send in peacekeepers and widen an arms embargo to protect civilians, a UN-mandated mission said on Friday.
Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have both raped and attacked civilians, used torture and made arbitrary arrests, according to the report that said it was based on 182 interviews with survivors, relatives and witnesses. “The gravity of our findings and failure of the warring parties to protect civilians underscores the need for urgent and immediate intervention,” the UN fact-finding mission’s chair, Mohamed Chande Othman, told reporters.
Both sides have dismissed past accusations from the US and rights groups, and have accused each other of carrying out abuses. Neither immediately responded to requests for comment on Friday, or released a statement in response to the report.
Othman and the two other mission members called for an independent force to be deployed without delay.
“We cannot continue to have people dying before our eyes and do nothing about it,” mission member Mona Rishmawi said. A UN-mandated peacekeeping force was a possibility, she added.
The mission called for the expansion of an existing UN arms embargo which currently just applies to the western region of Darfur where thousands of ethnic killings have been reported. The war that started in Khartoum in April last year has spread to 14 out of 18 of the country’s states.

Hundreds of rapes reported
The mission said it had also found reasonable grounds to believe the RSF and its allied militias had committed additional war crimes including the abduction of women who were forced into sexual slavery and the recruitment of child soldiers.
Mission member Joy Ngozi Ezeilo said unnamed support groups had received reports of more than 400 rapes in the first year of the war, but the real number was probably much higher.
“The rare brutality of this war will have a devastating and long-lasting psychological impact on children,” she said.
The fact-finding team said it had tried to contact Sudanese authorities on multiple occasions but had got no answer. It said the RSF had asked to cooperate with the mission, without elaborating.
The conflict began when competition between the army and the RSF, who had previously shared power after staging a coup, flared into open warfare.
Civilians in Sudan are facing worsening famine, mass displacement and disease after 17 months of war, aid agencies say.
US-led mediators said last month that they had secured guarantees from both parties at talks in Switzerland to improve access for humanitarian aid, but that the Sudanese army’s absence from the discussions had hindered progress.
The report is the three-member mission’s first since its creation in October 2023 by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
A group of Western countries including Britain will call for its renewal at a meeting this month, with diplomats expecting opposition from Sudan which says the war is an internal affair.