Benjamin Netanyahu fires Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, sparking protests across Israel | Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fired his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a figure widely seen by Israel's international allies as a brake on the far-right elements of the country's coalition government, sparking protests across Israel.

Netanyahu said in a video statement late Tuesday that “significant gaps had emerged in the management of the fight” in Gaza.

“At the height of a war, absolute trust is required between the prime minister and the defense minister… In recent months that trust between myself and the defense minister has been damaged,” he said. The move sparked protests across the country.

Israel Katz, a Likud colleague and current foreign minister, will replace Gallant. The leader of the center-right New Hope party, Gideon Saar, who rejoined Netanyahu's coalition in September, will serve as foreign minister.

Katz wrote on
of Hamas in Gaza, the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the containment of
Iranian aggression and the return of the inhabitants of the north and
in safety south to their homes.”

Within hours, thousands of protesters gathered in central Tel Aviv, beating drums and blocking the city's main street. About 1,000 people demonstrated outside Netanyahu's home in Jerusalem, while protests and roadblocks also broke out elsewhere in the country, with clashes reportedly breaking out between demonstrators and police.

In Tel Aviv, protesters held signs with slogans such as “We deserve better leaders” and “Leave no one behind!” One protester wore handcuffs and a face mask with Netanyahu's likeness, while others chanted “Take her home now!” T-shirts with references to hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

“We, the protesters, believe that Gallant … is actually the only normal person in the government,” said 54-year-old teacher Samuel Miller, condemning Netanyahu's government for opening “new fronts in unjustified wars.”

Netanyahu has been at odds with Gallant since his last coalition took office in late 2022, when the defense minister was the only senior government official to speak out against planned judicial reforms that critics said represented a democratic backsliding.

His release was long awaited. Over 13 months of war in Gaza and one in Lebanon, differences over strategy and how best to bring Israeli hostages home continued to lead to conflict between the two men. The final straw appears to have been Gallant's renewed efforts this week to enforce conscription for the ultra-Orthodox community. The two ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset, Netanyahu's long-time allies, strongly oppose the new policy.

In a statement late Tuesday, Gallant said his firing was due to disputes over ultra-Orthodox military conscription, Israel's “moral obligation to return the hostages” and the need for a comprehensive investigation to learn lessons from the Oct. 7 terror attacks.

Gallant had also publicly rejected Netanyahu's oft-repeated goal of a “total victory” over Hamas, saying Israel's military success had created the conditions for a diplomatic agreement. “The security of the State of Israel has been and remains the mission of my life,” he wrote on X on Tuesday evening, a few minutes after Netanyahu’s announcement.

The Hostage Families Forum released a statement expressing deep concern about the impact the sudden change could have on the fate of the 101 hostages still in Gaza.

“We expect the new defense minister to prioritize a hostage deal and work closely with mediators and the international community to ensure the immediate release of all hostages,” it said.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said on X that the move was an “act of madness” in the middle of the war. “Netanyahu is selling out Israel’s security and Israeli army soldiers for shameful political survival,” he said.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whose largely ceremonial post is intended to help unify the country, called the firing “the last thing Israel needs.”

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir praised Netanyahu for firing Gallant. “With Gallant… no absolute victory can be achieved – and the prime minister did well to remove him from office,” Ben-Gvir said on Telegram.

Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, a newly formed left-wing party, used social media to call on Israelis to take to the streets to protest Gallant's firing. Thousands of Israelis took part in spontaneous demonstrations and strikes in March to oppose Netanyahu's first attempt to fire his defense minister over judicial reform. The unexpected backlash forced the prime minister to reverse his decision and postpone the reform until the next Knesset session.

Polls show Gallant has consistently been the most popular member of Netanyahu's Cabinet. Before entering politics, he was a senior military general and was widely seen at home and abroad as a moderate influence on Netanyahu's decision-making. The International Criminal Court prosecutor's office is seeking an arrest warrant for both men over Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza.

Benny Gantz, a major Netanyahu rival, former defense minister and leader of the center-right National Unity party, joined the prime minister's three-member war cabinet alongside Gallant after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, but resigned in June, saying Netanyahu is “prevents us from moving toward true victory.”

Gantz described the move as “politics at the expense of national security.”

It is possible that the prime minister could close the war cabinet and return to a previous model in which security issues are discussed in a limited forum before being presented at regular cabinet meetings.

A White House spokesman praised Gallant as an “important partner” and said the U.S. would “continue to work with Israel's next defense minister.”

However, a senior US official said he had “real questions about the reasons for Gallant's dismissal and the background to this decision,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. It quoted the official as saying Netanyahu's decision was “surprising” and “worrying, especially in the midst of two wars and as Israel prepares to defend itself against a possible attack from Iran.”

In Gaza, the World Health Organization said it hoped the largest medical evacuation from the territory since the outbreak of war would begin on Wednesday. 113 seriously ill and injured patients were expected to travel via Israel for treatment in the United Arab Emirates and Romania.

According to the WHO, around 14,000 people outside the Gaza Strip need urgent medical care. About half suffer from serious injuries caused by the fighting and the other half suffer from serious illnesses such as cancer.

At the start of the war, Israel gave around 5,000 people permission to leave Gaza for medical reasons, but only 282 have been able to do so since Israeli forces took control of Rafah on the Egyptian border in May. Rafah has served as Gaza's main lifeline to the outside world since Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on the area after Hamas seized control of the area in 2007.

It was not immediately clear whether any of the medical evacuees would be moved from the northern third of the Gaza Strip, which Israel cut off from the rest of Gaza earlier this year. Israeli forces have been waging a renewed ground and air offensive in the area since early October, which they say is necessary to destroy newly formed Hamas cells.

Sweeping evacuation orders for the 400,000 people the United Nations estimates still live there, the blockade of aid and food shipments, and attacks on civilian infrastructure, including the three remaining and battered hospitals, have led human rights groups to accuse Israel of war crimes attempted violent attacks to displace the remaining population.

Israel has denied that it is systematically expelling Palestinians from the territory or using food as a weapon, both of which are illegal under international law.

Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday killed at least 30 people, including eight women and six children in the northern city of Beit Lahiya. The Israeli military said it attacked a weapons depot.

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report