Israel Katz became the 22nd Foreign Minister of Israel on Monday evening after the Knesset approved a power sharing agreement by which he replaced Eli Cohen.
The Foreign Ministry will mark Katz’s entry into the job on Tuesday morning with a small ceremony in its Jerusalem office.
Cohen will now replace Katz, as the country’s Energy and Infrastructure Minister.
They will hold these posts for two years, presuming the government remains in power. They will swap posts once more, for the government’s last year in 2026.
The sharing power agreement, set in place when the government was sworn in last year. It was executed three months into the Gaza war. Cohen has been one of the leading faces of the campaign to secure diplomatic support for that military campaign to destroy Hamas and oust it from Gaza.
Katz, a veteran Likud minister who first joined the Knesset in 1998, served briefly as Foreign Minister from February 2019 to May 2020.
Katz has also held the posts of Agriculture, Finance, Intelligence and Transportation Ministries.
A job with quick handovers
He inherits a Foreign Ministry which has seen enormous turnover at the top, as his three predecessors have all held office for less than two years.
The post itself was empty from 2015 to 2019, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding both that office and his own.