Representatives from the high school teachers’ union were set to meet with government officials Saturday night in a last-ditch bid to avert a nationwide strike before the official start of the school year on Sunday.

Education Minister Yoav Kisch was set to meet at 11 p.m. with union chairman Ran Erez, Federation of Local Authorities chief Haim Bibas, and Efraim Malkin, the commissioner for wages and work agreements at the Finance Ministry.

The sides were “not optimistic” ahead of the talks, according to Kan news.

In a statement on Saturday, released a few hours before the meeting was set to begin, Kisch told media, “I want to say that the teachers’ strike, at this time, is a mistake, and irresponsible.” He invoked not only the ongoing war against Hamas, but also students’ disrupted experiences in recent years during the Covid pandemic.

“But we aren’t losing hope, and we don’t have the privilege of giving up,” he continued.

The Secondary School Teachers Association has been engaged in ongoing yet deadlocked negotiations with the education and finance ministries, with instructors demanding retroactive wage increases and other benefits that were agreed upon before the last school year began, but which were deferred due to Hamas’s October 7 attack and the outbreak of war.

The union is also seeking a collective salary agreement, a major sticking point in the negotiations, while the government has pushed for individual contracts for teachers amid a budgetary shortfall.

On Thursday, the union officially declared that teachers would go on strike at the start of the school year, with leader Ran Erez saying he was open to negotiations, but that the government must “bring us an offer that we can accept.”

The union on Friday morning waived the strike for some localities along the Gaza and Lebanon borders, however, citing the security situation.

The last-minute meeting on Saturday came despite a video posted by the teachers’ union to YouTube on Friday, in which Erez rejected the possibility that the strike could be averted.

“On Sunday, September 1, we will not begin the school year. No matter what they write to you, what they tell you, what they promise you, on Sunday there will be a strike. Nothing can stop this strike,” Erez said.

On Saturday, Erez reiterated his commitment to strike, saying in a message to teachers, “Like I said in the video I sent you yesterday, the teachers’ union will be on strike at the start of the school year, and as such tomorrow, there will be no classes.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has also sought to avoid the strike. In a video posted to social media Thursday, Smotrich said that the strike was “about power,” and accused Erez of working against teachers’ interests.

“I implore you to start the year,” Smotrich said, arguing the importance of a functioning education system amid the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.

“The people of Israel need it, your students need it. Certainly now in wartime, they need a strong, supportive education system that will help them and all of us deal with the difficult period of war,” he said.

The Secondary School Teachers Association represents educators working with students in grades 7-12. According to statistics provided by the Education Ministry, some 514,000 students are registered at high schools for the upcoming school year and 335,000 at middle schools.

Strikes over salary disputes delaying the start of school studies have become commonplace in Israel.

Last year, with mere hours to go before the start of the school year, high school teachers and government officials reached a deal to bump up salaries, avoiding a threatened strike that would have delayed classes.

But the government later failed to honor those agreements, citing the cuts brought on by the war.

In 2022, a separate teachers union that represents elementary and middle school teachers nearly delayed the start of the school year before the Treasury agreed to raise their salaries.

The 2024 budget slashed millions of shekels in funding from government ministries, including the Education Ministry, instead directing them toward displaced residents of the south and north amid the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

The Education Ministry faced a cut of NIS 38,283,000 ($10.3 million) in July.