The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has fired his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, a figure widely considered by Israel’s international allies to be a brake on the far-right elements of the country’s coalition government.
Netanyahu said in a video statement late on Tuesday that “significant gaps on handling the battle” in Gaza had emerged.
“At the height of a war, complete trust is needed between the prime minister and the defence minister … In recent months, that trust between me and the defence minister was damaged,” he said.
Israel Katz, a fellow Likud party member currently serving as foreign minister, will be Gallant’s replacement. The leader of the the centre-right New Hope, Gideon Saar, who rejoined Netanyahu’s coalition in September, will serve as foreign minister.
Netanyahu had been at odds with Gallant since his latest coalition entered office at the end of 2022, when the defence minister became the only senior government figure opposed to planned judicial reforms that critics said amounted to democratic backsliding.
His dismissal was long expected. Over 13 months of war in Gaza, and one in Lebanon, disagreements over strategy and how best to bring Israeli hostages home frequently put the two men at loggerheads. The final straw appears to have been Gallant’s renewed efforts this week to enforce military conscription for the Ultra-Orthodox community. The two Ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset, Netanyahu’s longstanding allies, are obdurately opposed to the new policy.
Gallant had also publicly dismissed Netanyahu’s oft-repeated goal of “total victory” over Hamas, saying that Israel’s military success had created the conditions for a diplomatic deal. “The security of the state of Israel was and will always remain the mission of my life,” he wrote on X on Tuesday night, minutes after Netanyahu’s announcement.
The Hostage Families Forum released a statement in which it expressed deep concern over how the sudden change could affect the fate of the 101 hostages still in Gaza.
“We expect the incoming defence minister to prioritise a hostage deal and work closely with mediators and the international community to secure the immediate release of all hostages,” it said.
Yair Golan, the head of the Democrats, a newly formed leftwing party, used social media to urge Israelis to take to the streets in protest against Gallant’s firing. Thousands of Israelis took part in spontaneous demonstrations and strikes in March to oppose Netanyahu’s first attempt to fire his defence minister over the judicial overhaul. The unexpected backlash forced the prime minister to reverse his decision and postpone the overhaul until the next Knesset session.
Polls show that Gallant has consistently been the most popular member of Netanyahu’s cabinet. A senior general in the military before entering politics, he was widely viewed at home and abroad as a moderate influence over Netanyahu’s decision making. The prosecutor’s office of the international criminal court is seeking an arrest warrant for both men over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.
Benny Gantz, a major Netanyahu rival, former defence minister and leader of the centre-right National Unity party, joined the prime minister’s three-man war cabinet alongside Gallant in the aftermath of the 7 October Hamas attack, but he resigned in June, saying Netanyahu was “preventing us from progressing towards a true victory”.
It is possible that the the prime minister could shutter the war cabinet and revert to a former model in which security issues are discussed in a limited forum before being presented at regular cabinet meetings.
In Gaza, the World Health Organization said it hoped the biggest medical evacuation from the territory since the war broke out would get under way on Wednesday, with 113 seriously ill and injured patients expected to leave via Israel for treatment in the United Arab Emirates and Romania.
About 14,000 people are in urgent need of medical care outside Gaza, according to WHO data. Around half are suffering from severe injuries caused by the fighting and half from serious conditions such as cancer.
Israel granted permission for about 5,000 people to leave Gaza for medical reasons earlier in the war, but only 282 have been able to do so since Israeli forces seized control of Rafah on the Egyptian border in May. Rafah had served as Gaza’s main lifeline to the outside world since Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on the territory after Hamas took control of it in 2007.
It was not immediately clear whether any of the medical evacuees would be transferred from the northern third of Gaza, which Israel cut off from the rest of the strip at the beginning of the year. Israeli forces have waged a renewed ground and aerial offensive on the area since early October, which it says is necessary to mop up Hamas cells that have regrouped.
Sweeping evacuation orders for the 400,000 people whom the UN estimates still live there, the blockade of aid and food deliveries and the targeting of civilian infrastructure including the three remaining and struggling hospitals have led rights groups to accuse Israel of the war crime of seeking to forcibly displace the remaining population.
Israel has denied it is systematically removing Palestinians from the area or using food as a weapon, both of which are illegal under international law.
At least 30 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes across Gaza on Tuesday, including eight women and six children in the northern town of Beit Lahiya. The Israeli military said it had targeted a weapons storage facility.