Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that he will not ask Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to leave his post due to the growing security crisis, writes Reuters.
Netanyahu announced in March that he would fire Israel’s defense minister, who opposed planned justice reforms. The prime minister’s decision sparked widespread protests and alarmed Israel’s foreign partners.
Netanyahu has now announced that he has managed to resolve the rift caused by Galant’s public call for the government to suspend justice reforms. At the press conference on Monday,the 10th of April, the Prime Minister informed that he would postpone the dismissal of Gallant: “I have decided to put aside our differences.” In the last two weeks,
the prime minister has been working closely with the defense minister.
An Italian tourist was killed in Tel Aviv on Friday, the 7th of April, just hours after an Israeli resident and her two daughters were killed in a shooting in the West Bank. The attacks have heightened tensions, which were already high after shootings in the Gaza and Israeli police raids on a Jerusalem mosque.
A survey conducted by Israel’s Channel 13 News on Sunday, the 9th of April, shows that if the elections were held now, Netanyahu’s party would lose as much as a third of the seats, and would not gain a majority in the government. The Prime Minister, however, announced that he was not worried about the results of the survey. He noted that relations with the US, threatened by reckless justice reform, were stronger than ever, and the two countries cooperated on security and intelligence issues.
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