Oppositions over whether to continue the war in Gaza or look for peace have grown inside Israel, with top officials rebuking Netanyahu for his latest war decisions.
This Monday, two of the top Israeli officials rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in separate statement over his latest war decisions. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit and the Religious Zionist party’s Bezalel Smotrich both blamed Netanyahu for slowing down Israel’s war machine in Gaza.
Ben Gvir said in a post on X that “if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decides to end the war without an extensive attack on Rafah in order to defeat Hamas, he will not have a mandate to continue serving as Prime Minister.”
Rebuking Israel’s Prime Minister for excluding the security cabinet from decision making for the war in Gaza, Bezalel Smotrich called on Netanyahu to “immediately convene a meeting of the security cabinet in order to discuss the current state of the war in Gaza.”
“The only forum authorized to make significant decisions in war is the full [security] cabinet, but unfortunately, this is not how things are happening,” Smotrich said in a statement this Monday, adding also that “we are seeing decisions being made in the smaller [war] cabinet without approval, without updating the full cabinet, under international pressure that is harming the war’s momentum and our security interests.”
Likewise, Knesset minister Gideon Saar of the right-wing New Hope party said on Sunday that “the continuous reduction in the size of the forces and the intensity of military pressure in recent months has taken us far away from achieving the goals of the war,” adding that this “has a direct relationship to avoiding coming up with a new plan for the hostages.”
The statements by Ben Gvir and Smotrich come one day after a withdrawal of the bulk of Israel’s troops from Gaza, which Hebrew media referred to as an official end to the Israeli ground operation in the strip, until further notice.
However, hundreds of Israeli soldiers are still in Gaza to secure the Netzarim corridor – which cuts the strip in half and is used by Israeli forces to prevent the return of the displaced to north Gaza. Israel had initially planned for a full-scale assault on the desperately overcrowded city – which is holding over a million besieged Palestinians, most of whom were displaced from other areas of Gaza. however, that operations in Rafah have been postponed several times, and nobody knows why.
No green light for peace from Tel Aviv yet!
While Israeli far-right ministers and officials are blaming Netanyahu for slowing down the pace of the war, peace talks between Israel and Hamas are also showing no progress.
One Hamas official said in this regard on Monday that no progress has been made in the latest talks for a Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal. “All the attempts … and efforts made by the mediators to achieve an agreement and exchange deal have been met with intransigence and failure by the occupation,” the source told Al-Mayadeen. “Until now, there is no progress in the negotiations … Zionist media practices lying and deception to deceive its society through fabricated news,” the Hamas official noted.
Admitting the stalemate in peace negotiations, one Israeli official said in an interview with Ynet that there is still no deal “on the horizon,” adding that “distance [between the sides] is still great and there has been nothing dramatic so far.”
