Gantz: Attempted bus bombings must be ‘wake-up call,’ PM playing politics at expense of security

By Sam Sokol 24 February 2025, 3:43 pm

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Sam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

Leader of the National Unity party MK Benny Gantz leads a faction meeting at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, on February 24, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Calling last week’s failed plot to bomb multiple buses in Israel’s central Gush Dan region a “wake-up call,” National Unity chairman Benny Gantz says that Israel must “destroy the terrorist nests that are minutes away” from Israeli communities by “pouring” additional forces into the West Bank.

Three empty buses exploded in quick succession in parking lots in the Tel Aviv suburbs of Bat Yam and Holon Thursday night and one or two more bombs were discovered on additional buses in Holon. No casualties occurred as a result of the explosions.

The IDF is currently engaged in an ongoing major offensive in the northern West Bank, dubbed Operation Iron Wall, which was launched on January 21.

To defeat terror, “thousands more fighters are needed” but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “is busy making political deals at the expense of security and the economy,” Gantz alleges in remarks to the press ahead of his party’s weekly faction meeting in the Knesset.

Netanyahu has repeatedly promised his ultra-Orthodox partners to pass an enlistment bill regulating the status of yeshiva students whose longtime IDF deferrals were struck down by the High Court of Justice last summer.

“Thousands have been injured and killed and the IDF is desperate for more soldiers. The reservists are returning [to service] for the fifth and sixth time. The best of our sons are risking their lives again and again and the prime minister is not willing to risk the integrity of the coalition” by drafting Haredim, Gantz says.

“Where will the soldiers who will unleash hell on Gaza, while at the same time operating in Tulkarm, southern Lebanon and the Syrian Golan, come from? A year and a half into the most complex war in our history, and the October 7 government is not expanding the ranks. The government is playing for time – and we will all pay the price.”