Israel’s ousted defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has reportedly said the army has achieved all its objectives in Gaza and that Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a hostages-for-peace deal against the advice of his own security establishment.
Gallant was speaking to hostages’ families on Thursday, two days after being sacked by Netanyahu, and reports of his remarks quickly surfaced in Israeli media.
“There’s nothing left in Gaza to do. The major achievements have been achieved,” Channel 12 news quoted him as saying. “I fear we are staying there just because there is a desire to be there.”
He reportedly told the families that the idea that Israel must remain in Gaza to create stability was “an inappropriate idea to risk soldiers’ lives over”.
Citing a source familiar with the conversation, Haaretz also reported that Gallant had said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had achieved all their objectives in Gaza. The Israeli newspaper’s report said the prime minister’s considerations regarding a hostage deal “are neither military nor political”.
Gallant is said to have told the families that Netanyahu was the only person who could decide on whether to make a deal involving the release of Israeli hostages by Hamas in return for the freeing of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and an initially temporary ceasefire.
The Biden administration has been trying to broker such an agreement since May, when the US president announced the blueprint of a phased agreement, claiming it had been accepted by the Netanyahu government, but the Israeli prime minister made a series of comments distancing himself from its terms.
He later made an agreement contingent on maintaining an IDF presence in the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, which was unacceptable to Hamas. US officials came to see Netanyahu as at least as big an obstacle to peace as Hamas.
Gallant reportedly told the hostage families there was no military reason for holding on to the strip of land.
“The IDF commander and I said there was no security reason for remaining in the Philadelphi corridor,” Channel 12 reported him as saying. “Netanyahu said that it was a diplomatic consideration; I’m telling you there was no diplomatic consideration.”
Gallant’s departure from the coalition government removes the last major rival to Netanyahu, and the last relative moderate, from a cabinet dominated by the hard right. The Knesset passed a bill on Thursday, put forward by a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, which would allow the deportation of close relatives of anyone convicted of terrorist offences, even if the deportee was an Israeli citizen.
Although it is not specified in the text of the law, it is widely assumed that the new law is intended to apply to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and not to the relatives of convicted Jewish terrorists.
Gallant’s remarks on Thursday are politically explosive in Israel, where the families of the remaining hostages being held in Gaza, their supporters and the Israeli opposition have all accused Netanyahu of keeping the conflict in Gaza going to put off a new election, and the risk of losing power.
The absence of a ceasefire in Gaza has also prolonged the conflict in Lebanon, where the Shia militia Hezbollah has vowed to keep up attacks on Israel as long as Palestinians are being bombed in Gaza.
Lebanon’s civil defence service said 30 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in the town of Barja, in the Bekaa valley on Wednesday. The IDF has claimed that 60 Hezbollah fighters had been killed within 24 hours. Lebanese news agencies said two drones in the vicinity had been targeting moving cars.
The health authorities in Gaza said 27 had been killed on Thursday morning, most in northern Gaza, where the IDF has been ordering civilians to evacuate.
More than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the past 13 months of Israeli bombardment, according to estimates by the Hamas-run health authorities, which are generally seen by the UN and other aid agencies as reliable.
Over the same period, more than 3,000 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon, the vast majority in the past six weeks.
