This Israeli man has been arrested for refusing to give his wife a divorce for 13 years that included spending the last 6 years on the run to avoid a court appearance.

Under Israeli law, divorce is exclusively in the hands of the rabbinical courts and when a man and a woman want to divorce, the man has to give the woman a document called a “get”.

The problem is however that in some cases men refuse unless the woman agrees to sign over all the property or make a financial payment to the man and his family.

If a man refuses to give his wife a “get”, there are various measures that can be taken against the “recalcitrant” by the religious authorities, including banning him from leaving the country or ordering that his employment be terminated.

But in this case, Ronen Vital disappeared from the rabbinical courtroom where the divorce proceedings between him and his wife Orly Vital were taking place back in 2015. At the time, they had already been in the process of getting divorced for six years.

Since then, the mother of four has been left in a legal limbo land, as she cannot divorce her husband unless he gives her a “get” and this is something that he has always refused to do, she told local newspaper The Times of Israel.

Ronen was tracked down after six years on the run when a legal aid organisation called Yad La’isha received a tipoff about his whereabouts.

They put private investigators on the case, resulting in his arrest.

According to the organisation’s director, Pnina Omer, the husband is still refusing to divorce his wife even after his arrest last week.

Orly, 42, claims that their marriage went south when both their families started arguing about money. She says that he would quietly whisper in her ear “you’ll never be given a get until you give my mother money.”

She says that he would whisper to her quietly because he was afraid that she would record him, because, she claims, this is what he would always do to her.

It is currently unclear what steps the authorities plan to take to resolve the situation, but Orly says that her predicament has not stopped her from carrying on with her life, whereas he has spent his in hiding for the last six years.