Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister on Tuesday, announcing that he had lost trust in Yoav Gallant as the Jewish state’s war against terror groups in the region stretches past the one-year mark.
“During the last months, this trust between me and the Minister of Defense has cracked,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. “This crisis does not allow for the normal continuation of the management of the campaign.”
“I made many attempts to bridge these gaps, but they kept getting wider,” Netanyahu continued. “They also came to the knowledge of the public in an unacceptable way, and worse than that, they came to the knowledge of the enemy — our enemies enjoyed it and derived a lot of benefit from it.”
Yoav Gallant responded to the news with a simple statement: “The security of the state of Israel always was and will always remain my life’s mission.”
Gallant, a fellow Likud Party member, has long been at odds with Netanyahu over the prosecution of the war against Hamas in Gaza, among other issues.
In March 2023, the prime minister briefly cut ties with Gallant over the latter’s insistence that the government’s judicial reforms would jeopardize Israel’s security. Massive protests drove Netanyahu to quickly reinstate his defense minister.
“The deepening split is seeping into the military and security agencies — this is a clear, immediate and real danger to Israel’s security,” Gallant said at the time. “I will not facilitate this.”
Another point of contention between the two concerned the enlistment of ultra-Orthodox men into the military, an obligation they have been previously exempt from, but a measure that the former defense minister supports.
Gallant was a stark critic of the prime minister’s decision to hang on to the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, which the IDF had seized for security purposes; Gallant referred to Netanyahu’s refusal to consider withdrawing from it as part of a possible deal to retrieve Israeli hostages as a “moral disgrace.”
Gallant told a closed-door Knesset committee in August that Netanyahu’s vision of “absolute victory” in Gaza was “nonsense,” according to Israeli media. Netanyahu then responded by accusing Gallant of embracing an “anti-Israel narrative.”
Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz will replace Gallant and Gideon Saar will slide into Katz’s role as Israel’s chief diplomat.
This development comes at a critical juncture in the Middle East, where Israel is still engaged in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in addition to bracing for another salvo of Iranian projectiles in the coming days amid the U.S. presidential election.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Gallant criticized the decision to seize the Philadelphi Corridor. Gallant actually criticized the decision not to consider withdrawing from the area as part of a deal to secure the return of hostages.