Soldiers in Gaza are being “sacrificed on the altar of maintaining the coalition,” Yisrael Beytenu chairman MK Avigdor Liberman said during a press conference ahead of his party’s weekly meeting on Monday.
Liberman argued that the only reason the war had not ended already was because if so, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have lost the support of the far-right Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionist Party (RZP), and thus lost his majority coalition.
The statement received mixed reactions from the other Zionist opposition parties. Democrats chairman MK Yair Golan said that he had been saying the same for weeks, while centrist party leaders MK Benny Gantz (Blue and White) and Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) distanced themselves from the statement but did not condemn it,
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich strongly condemned the statement. In a press conference following RZP’s weekly party meeting, Smotrich said that the statement was “nonsense,” that Liberman consistently set records for “crossing red lines” in his statements, and that his comments constituted “insensitivity” and even “cruelty” towards the families of fallen soldiers. Smotrich also criticized the media for not calling Liberman out.
Smotrich also spoke at length about a spat between him and IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir in a National Security Cabinet meeting on Saturday meeting, that was leaked to the press.
The finance minister argued that Zamir had failed to deliver on a cabinet decision from January, that required the IDF to ensure that humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza did not reach Hamas. This led to the government being forced to allow aid trucks into the northern part of the Gaza Strip that were not part of the distribution system run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Smotrich claimed that Hamas was acting “frantically” against the GHF system, which proved that its stated goal, to block Hamas from profiting from humanitarian aid, was working. The finance minister did not address the hundreds of Palestinian casualties in the vicinity of the distribution centers.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich both criticized the deal
Ben-Gvir in his comments to the media on Monday called on Smotrich to join him and create a bloc to prevent a new hostage deal from advancing. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich both criticized the emerging deal, arguing that it would lead to Hamas’s rehabilitation.
Ben-Gvir said that his six MKs were not enough to threaten the 68-MK coalition, but that alongside Smotrich they could effectively threaten the government. Ben-Gvir said that when he had the ability to threaten the government (prior to the reentry to the government of Gideon Sa’ar United Right party), he had succeeded in thwarting what he called “reckless” deals.