Slamming Gantz, Smotrich demands security cabinet, not war cabinet runs meetings on Gaza

Finance Minister and leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party Bezalel Smotrich demands that any discussions about strategy in Gaza and the future of Gaza after the war take place in the Security Cabinet rather than in the limited war cabinet.

The war cabinet is made up of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz, who brought the National Unity Party into the coalition at the start of the war.

“The formation of the war cabinet that excluded the Religious Zionism party from the day-to-day management of the campaign was an illegitimate and problematic demand of Benny Gantz,” Smotrich says of his demand to move key meetings to the government’s security cabinet.

“We will insist that all strategic decisions, and certainly the decisions regarding the future of Gaza, will be made only in the political and security cabinet where all the parties in the government are represented and who will challenge the old way of thinking, and not in the limited war cabinet where the perceptions and concepts of the past, which we, as a people, have already sobered up from, are over-represented.”

Smotrich’s demand comes after Netanyahu canceled a war cabinet meeting about Israel’s plan for who will govern Gaza after the war that was supposed to take place on Thursday evening and had reportedly angered Smotrich.