Israel’s wartime government frays as frustration with Netanyahu grows.
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Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Israel’s war cabinet, said on Saturday that he would soon leave the country’s emergency wartime government unless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked to immediately answer major questions about the future of Israel’s war.
“If you choose the path of zealots, dragging the country into the abyss, we will be forced to leave the government,” Mr. Gantz said in a televised news conference. “We will turn to the people and build a government that will earn the people’s trust.”
Mr. Gantz, who leads the National Unity party, said he would give Mr. Netanyahu until Jun. 8 — about three weeks — to reach an agreement in Israel’s war cabinet on a six-point plan to bring back the hostages, address the future governance of Gaza, return displaced Israelis to their homes and advance normalization with Saudi Arabia, among other issues.
His party’s departure would not by itself topple Mr. Netanyahu’s government, which would still hold 64 seats in the 120-member Parliament. But it would end a fragile wartime partnership that helped keep Israel unified and provided Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-line coalition with more moderate faces, boosting the country’s legitimacy abroad.
In a statement, Mr. Netanyahu fired back that Mr. Gantz was essentially calling for “Israeli defeat” and would allow Hamas to remain in power. He also said Mr. Gantz was “choosing to place ultimatums for the prime minister, rather than for Hamas.”
Mr. Gantz’s comments came amid growing domestic frustration with Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to decisively defeat Hamas or bring home the remaining hostages. Israeli forces recently recovered the bodies of four captives held in Gaza since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, heightening fears over the fate of the remaining 128 hostages.
Over seven months into Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza, its leadership is deeply divided over how to move forward. The government opposes Hamas’s demand for a permanent truce, undercutting cease-fire talks for the release of hostages. Israeli troops have returned to parts of northern Gaza, seeking to clear out a renewed Hamas insurgency there. Israelis displaced amid bombardment by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah have little idea when they will return.
The Israeli government has yet to put forward a clear plan for what a postwar Gaza might look like, a task complicated by the government’s fractious makeup. Mr. Netanyahu’s partners include hard-line ministers who want to build new Israeli settlements in Gaza, as well as more moderate politicians like Mr. Gantz.
Long one of Mr. Netanyahu’s main opponents, Mr. Gantz — a former military chief of staff — joined the Israeli government after the Oct. 7 attack as an emergency wartime measure. The result has been a fragile coalition, with Mr. Gantz’s party trading fire with Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right allies and occasionally the prime minister himself.
On Wednesday, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, similarly criticized Mr. Netanyahu’s management of the war, warning that the government’s failure to decide on a postwar plan for Gaza was leading the country down “a dangerous course.” He called on Mr. Netanyahu to explicitly rule out setting up Israeli “military governance” in Gaza.
“Since October, I have been raising this issue consistently in the cabinet and have received no response,” said Mr. Gallant, a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party. “The end of the military campaign must come with political action.”
To some extent, both Mr. Gallant’s and Mr. Gantz’s criticisms were similar to those of U.S. officials. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said this week that Israel had to advance a “clear, concrete plan” for postwar governance in Gaza.
“We cannot have Hamas controlling Gaza,” Mr. Blinken said. “We can’t have chaos and anarchy in Gaza.” He added that the United States was looking “to Israel to come forward with its ideas.”
But while the Biden administration says it supports a Palestinian state — of which Gaza would likely be an integral part — neither Mr. Gantz nor Mr. Gallant has indicated immediate support for that. Both men have insisted that Israel must maintain “security control” to prevent a recurrence of the Oct. 7 attacks. On Saturday, Mr. Gantz vowed that “we will not allow any party, whether friends or enemies, to impose a Palestinian state upon us,” echoing Mr. Netanyahu’s rhetoric opposing Palestinian sovereignty.
Until a permanent solution is found, Mr. Gantz said, Gaza should be temporarily run by an “American-European-Arab-Palestinian administration,” with Israeli security oversight. In a statement following the speech, he also joined Mr. Netanyahu in dismissing a role for the internationally backed Palestinian Authority, Hamas’s main rival.
— Aaron Boxerman and Ephrat Livni
Key Developments
Israel presses on with its Rafah operation, and other news.
Israeli forces said on Saturday that they had recovered the body of Ron Binyamin, 53, an Israeli man held hostage in Gaza since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7. On the morning of the attack, Mr. Binyamin — a husband and father of two daughters — had set out on a bicycle ride with friends near Be’eri, a small kibbutz near the Gaza border. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said Hamas militants killed Mr. Binyamin and took his body back to Gaza, where his remains were retrieved on Thursday night along with those of Yitzhak Gelernter, Shani Louk and Amit Buskila.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing relatives of those captured on Oct. 7 during the Hamas-led attack on Israel, said a rally on Saturday evening in Tel-Aviv drew a crowd of 100,000 people. Ambassadors to Israel from the United States, England, Germany and Austria all spoke, pledging to continue their efforts to secure a deal to bring home the hostage.
Israeli ground forces pressed onward in the eastern outskirts of the city of Rafah on Saturday, the Israeli military said. Strikes and artillery fire have continued to resound across the area, according to aid officials sheltering in western Rafah. In a statement on Saturday morning, Hamas said its fighters had fired on Israeli troops in eastern Rafah and close to the Rafah border crossing. Although Israel has labeled the operation “limited,” the United Nations aid agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, said on Saturday that 800,000 people have had to leave Rafah, while satellite imagery shows widening destruction.
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was visiting Saudi Arabia on Saturday for talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and was scheduled to be in Israel on Sunday, where he was to meet with officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The White House national security spokesman, John Kirby, said on Friday that Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Netanyahu would discuss hostage talks, the humanitarian crisis and the “enduring defeat of Hamas through both military pressure and a political plan.” Israel and Hamas have held indirect negotiations in an attempt to reach a deal that would free at least some hostages in exchange for a cease-fire, but they appear to be stalled.
Aid to Gaza has been limited since the Rafah incursion, the U.N. says.
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As trucks loaded with humanitarian aid began rolling onto the shores of Gaza through a temporary pier this week, U.S. officials and aid groups emphasized that the new sea corridor could not replace the most efficient way of getting supplies to the territory’s civilians: land border crossings.
The United Nations gave an indication on Friday of how much the flow of aid through those crossings had dried up. Just 310 aid trucks entered Gaza in the 10 days after Israel began its military incursion in the southern city of Rafah, U.N. officials said.
That is far shy of what aid organizations say is needed in the territory. Humanitarian workers have repeatedly warned that famine is looming amid severe shortages of basic goods among civilians, many of whom have been displaced multiple times.
Before May 6, most aid reaching Gaza was delivered through two southern border crossings, at Rafah and Kerem Shalom.
As Israel entered Rafah, it seized and closed the border crossing with Egypt there, in what its military said was a limited operation against Hamas. Israel temporarily shut the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel after a Hamas rocket attack in the area killed four Israeli soldiers. The flow of goods has remained severely limited even after it was reopened.
From May 6 to Wednesday, 33 trucks entered Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, Farhan Haq, a U.N. spokesman, said on Friday. In the same period, 277 trucks entered through two crossings in northern Gaza, he said. The trucks were carrying flour and other food aid, according to the United Nations.
U.S. and Israeli officials have previously said one of the reasons for the stoppage is that Egypt is trying to pressure Israel to pull back from Rafah by not allowing trucks at that crossing to redirect to Kerem Shalom.
More than 2,000 trucks of aid were stuck on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing as of Thursday, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees aid delivery in Gaza, said on Friday that 365 trucks of aid had entered Gaza in the past day. It did not specify whether the figure included deliveries from the temporary pier. Israel and the United Nations use different methods to track truck deliveries.
— Victoria Kim
A family flees Rafah to live in the ruins of its home in Khan Younis.
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When Mohammed al-Lahham and his family returned last week to Khan Younis, their hometown in Gaza, they went back to a city and home scarred by Israeli bombardment. They hoped they would not be forced to flee again.
“The situation here in my city is unbearable, but at least it is better than living in a tent,” said Mr. al-Lahham, a 41-year-old plumber and father of five. “I am finally back in Khan Younis, my hometown, where I know its people and places and streets.”
Those streets, many of them bulldozed, are now rimmed with the rubble of entire buildings after a ground invasion by Israeli forces left the city nearly unrecognizable. The forces withdrew from Khan Younis last month.
Much of Mr. al-Lahham’s home in the center of the city was destroyed, but the family has been trying to re-establish its life in the one room that remained mostly intact.
“I live in a room in which walls were blown off,” he said. “I put up some blankets I got from the U.N. as curtains to protect us inside.”
More than 630,000 Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes and shelters in and around the southern city of Rafah since Israel began a military offensive on May 6, UNRWA, the primary U.N. agency for Palestinians, said on Friday. Before May 6, Rafah, on the border with Egypt, had become home to more than one million Palestinians who fled their homes elsewhere in Gaza seeking a modicum of safety, even as the Israeli military continued to carry out airstrikes on the city. It was one of the last places that had not been invaded by Israeli soldiers.
Now, many Palestinians are seeking shelter in places like the central city of Deir al Balah and Al-Mawasi, a coastal area west of Khan Younis. Both are overcrowded and facing dire conditions, U.N. and aid groups have said.
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Israel continues to characterize its offensive in and around Rafah as a “limited operation” against Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The seizure of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, intensified airstrikes and artillery, and an expanding ground invasion into parts of Rafah have forced about half the Palestinians living and seeking shelter there to flee.
Satellite imagery suggested that a significant incursion was already underway.
On Thursday, Israel said it would send more forces to Rafah, signaling that it intended to attack deeper into the city despite international concerns about the threat to civilians posed by a full-scale invasion.
In the north, Israeli attacks and new military evacuation orders displaced more than 160,000 people from several areas around Gaza City, according to UNRWA.
“Forced displacement continues in the #GazaStrip,” UNRWA posted on social media this week, adding that “about 20% of #Gaza’s population have been displaced again in the past week. Families keep fleeing where they can — including to rubble & sand dunes — in search of safety. But there’s no such thing in Gaza.”
Beyond the displacement, the Israeli offensive and fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas have prevented nearly all aid from entering Gaza through the two main border crossings, and has impeded the little aid that has reached Gaza from being distributed, according to the U.N. and other aid groups.
That has forced families like the al-Lahhams to fend almost entirely for themselves.
On Thursday, Mr. al-Lahham stood in line with two of his sons to fill cans with water from a large tank brought in by a charity.
Even though Mr. al-Lahham said he was shot in his right shoulder by an Israeli armed drone, a wound that has yet to heal because the bullet is still inside, he knew he needed to get drinking water for his family.
“I sometimes try to carry heavy things with my left arm, like gallons of water,” he said. “You can see how I move it painfully, and this will affect my work as a plumber.”
While the water on Thursday was free, nothing else in the battered city was.
Even charging his cellphone at a street vendor cost him a few shekels. And with nearly no aid and limited commercial goods coming into Gaza, prices in the markets have increased more.
Mr. al-Lahham and his family are terrified they might be forced to flee again if the Israeli Army re-invades their city. If it does, they plan to go to Al-Mawasi. He just didn’t know how they would get there.
He had to borrow nearly $100 to pay for a van to bring his family to Khan Younis from Rafah.
“I don’t know where I could get any money to take us and our belongings if anything bad happened,” he said. “Why is all of this suffering still going on?”
— Raja Abdulrahim and Bilal Shbair
