Otzma Yehudit: Gafni’s questioning of need for Gaza war damages national security

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party slams United Torah Judaism lawmaker Moshe Gafni, asserting that his questioning of the necessity of the war in Gaza damages national security.

During a meeting of the Knesset Finance Committee on Wednesday, Gafni said that he did not understand “what we are fighting for” in Gaza and that Israel needs US President Donald Trump “to come and say we are returning the hostages, stopping all these things and returning to normal. But apparently we haven’t merited this yet.”

This rhetoric “recalls similar statements by the extreme leftist Moshe Ya’alon, harms Israel’s security and the families of the fallen heroes,” Otzma Yehudit says in a statement — referring to former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon’s assertion that Israel was carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in the northern Gaza Strip.

“Our heroic warriors are fighting an obligatory war against the modern Amalek — the Nazi terrorist organization Hamas” in order to “restore security to the residents of the south in particular and to the residents of Israel in general, and to return all of our hostages, living and dead,” the statement adds, asserting that the sacrifice of fallen soldiers requires Israel to continue until victory.

Gafni’s Degel Hatorah faction is part of the larger United Torah Judaism faction, which recently threatened to topple the government over efforts to conscript Haredim into the IDF. Lawmakers within the coalition and the opposition have been pushing for legislation that would end the longstanding exemption of yeshiva students from military service to make up for a wartime manpower shortage and ease the burden on reservists.