By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM (Reuters) -A far-right partner in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition threatened on Tuesday to quit the government over any attempt to enter a “reckless” deal with Hamas to retrieve hostages held by the Palestinian militants.
“Reckless deal = dismantling of the government,” Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party posted on X, amid media reports that Israel was considering a long-term pause, brokered by Qatar and Egypt, to its offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The conservative Netanyahu has stressed his commitment to destroying Hamas, whose Oct. 7 cross-border killing and kidnapping spree blindsided Israel, and argues that the military pressure improves the chances of recovering the 132 hostages.
But at least one member of Netanyahu’s decision-making war cabinet – former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, whose own son and nephew died fighting in Gaza – has cast doubt on the prospects for rescue missions and called for a hostage deal.
That has set off speculation that Netanyahu is under pressure from both his left- and right-wing flanks, spelling a potentially wider shakeup – and perhaps even a snap election.
Jewish Power accounts for six of the 64 seats that Netanyahu’s religious-rightist coalition held in the 120-seat parliament before the Gaza war. He has since brought Eisenkot’s 12-seat centrist party National Unity into an emergency cabinet.
Ben-Gvir and another ultranationalist coalition partner, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionism party, have chafed at their exclusion from the war cabinet.
They have called for no let-up in the offensive and for Israel to resettle Gaza, from which it withdrew in 2005. Netanyahu has ruled out rebuilding of Jewish settlements there but says post-war Gaza will be under Israeli security control.
The centrist leader of the parliamentary opposition, Yair Lapid, who did not join the unity war cabinet, said he would shore up the government from the outside in the event of a right-wing mutiny over a hostage deal.
“We will give the the government a safety net for any deal that will bring the abductees back home,” Lapid said on X.
(Writing by Dan Williams, Editing by Ari Rabinovitch and Ros Russell)
Comments