Ben Gvir slams Netanyahu’s ‘obscene habit’ of excluding him from war decisions
Demanding far tougher response to Hezbollah bombardment, far-right minister argues PM can’t ‘hide behind Gantz and Eisenkot anymore’
Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir lambasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on social media on Wednesday night for his insufficiently strong reaction to the Hezbollah terror group’s massive bombardment of Israel’s north, and for his continued exclusion of Ben Gvir from wartime decision-making.
Commenting on the fact that Hezbollah fired 215 rockets at Israel on Wednesday after a senior commander in the Iran-backed organization was killed by the Israel Defense Forces, Ben Gvir praised the military for the action but wrote that “hundreds of rockets cannot be answered with surgical actions,” in a post on X.
Once again calling for a more aggressive approach against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ben Gvir asserted that Netanyahu was now “out of excuses” for avoiding a full-on war with Hezbollah.
“You are the prime minister, and you cannot even hide behind [Benny] Gantz and [Gadi] Eisenkot anymore,” he wrote.
Gantz’s and Eisenkot’s centrist National Unity party joined the government in an “emergency” capacity shortly after the war in Gaza began with Hamas’s October 7 mass onslaught. As part of the agreement that saw the party join the wartime coalition, a small war cabinet was set up consisting of Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Gantz.
Eisenkot, who like Gantz is a former IDF chief of staff, was also involved in the cabinet as an observer.
Since the emergency government’s formation, Ben Gvir has decried the fact that his faction is not represented in the war cabinet. He has publicly made a series of hardline demands — including halting all humanitarian aid to Gaza and invading Lebanon with the goal of eliminating Hezbollah in its entirety — and has referred to National Unity’s departure from the coalition as a “big opportunity.”
On Wednesday evening, Netanyahu held a security assessment with security chiefs, with the escalation in the north one of the issues on the agenda.
“There is no doubt that the prime minister’s obscene habit of excluding me from security meetings ‘proved itself’ on October 7,” Ben Gvir wrote sarcastically in his X post, referring to his claims that Hamas and Hezbollah have long not been dealt with aggressively enough.
Ben Gvir has long called for Israel to go to war with Hezbollah after it started its near-daily attacks on Israel on October 8, which it says is in solidarity with Hamas which is at war with Israel in Gaza.
He has also claimed since October 7 that if his approach had been utilized with Hamas, it never would have launched its attack, in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were murdered and 251 were taken hostage.
