Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz threatened to resign unless the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu establishes a post-war plan for the Gaza Strip.
Gantz set a June 8 deadline for a plan that aims to achieve six “strategic objectives,” including ending Hamas rule in Gaza and establishing a multinational civil administration for the territory.
“If you put the national above the personal, you will find partners in the fight in us,” he said. “But if we choose the path of the fanatics and lead the entire nation into the abyss, we will be forced to resign from the government.”
Netanyahu dismissed the comments as “useless words” that would spell “defeat for Israel.”
The war cabinet was created in the days following the October 7 attacks, in which fighters from Hamas and other militant groups killed around 1,200 people and took another 252 hostage after entering Israel from Gaza.
Gantz’s comments came just days after another member of the war cabinet, Defense Minister Yoav Galante, Netanyahu urged publicly declare that Israel had no plans to assume civil and military rule in Gaza.
Gallant said he raised the issue repeatedly for months but received no response.
The episode shows a growing division in the Israeli war cabinet and Netanyahu’s government.
Gantz and Gallant say that maintaining control over Gaza would increase Israel’s security risks, while others, including far-right members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, believe that some control over Gaza is necessary to defeat Hamas.
In a televised speech on Saturday, Gantz told Netanyahu that “the people of Israel are watching you.”
“We must choose between Zionism and cynicism, between unity and factions, between responsibility and lawlessness, between victory and disaster,” he said.
Also among the six strategic objectives he established were the return of all Israeli and foreign hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza and the return of Palestinian civilians displaced to northern Gaza by September 1.
He also said Israel should continue to seek normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia as part of a “comprehensive process to create an alliance with the free world and the West against Iran and its allies.”
Responding to the speech, Netanyahu said that meeting Gantz’s demands would lead “to the end of the war and the defeat of Israel, the abandonment of most of the hostages, leaving Hamas intact, and the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
