Katz’s removal urged amid growing outcry over bid to fire general

Elazar Stern, a Yesh Atid lawmaker and retired senior officer, calls on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire Defense Minister Israel Katz over his decision to attempt to remove IDF Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth from his post, a move viewed by critics as baldly political.

“Katz is working for [party] primaries and not the security of Israel,” he posts online.

Yair Golan, a former deputy IDF chief of staff who now leads the left-wing Democrats party, says Katz’s attempt to remove Bluth, announced while appearing on the right-wing Channel 14, is a “political attack,” using a word that normally denotes terror activity.

“The ousting of a Central Command general on live TV, without the necessary processes and without [the approval of] the chief of staff, is a crossing of a red line that proves that this destructive government has lost all restraint,” he writes on X.

Moshe Turpaz, another Yesh Atid lawmaker who serves as an officer in the reserves, writes that Katz is causing the IDF “critical harm” with his move “in the name of populism.”

Coalition lawmakers, meanwhile, have been mostly mum on the subject, neither defending nor criticizing Katz.