Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has already been fired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in early 2023, before being returned to office, and was under threat of being fired several times since then.
Still, The Jerusalem Post understands that the break between Gallant and Netanyahu over the hostages deal is different than anything prior.
Previous disagreements between the two most powerful leaders in Israel today and which broke out into public in a chaotic way involved the judicial overhaul, how much or little to crackdown on IDF reservists threatening to quit over the overhaul, how many or few haredim (ultra-Orthodox) to draft into the IDF, and whether to use some version of the Palestinian Authority to replace Hamas in Gaza.
What is different now, the Post understands, is that Gallant is accusing Netanyahu of not indirectly, but rather directly endangering Israelis – the hostages – lives.
What is unique about this is that Gallant has not been publicly constantly in support of cutting a deal with Hamas for returning the hostages at nearly any price it might ask, which other top leaders like Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot also supported. Gantz and Eisenkot were fully willing to cut a deal for returning the hostages and ending the war without going into Rafah, and possibly even without going into Khan Yunis.
Eisenkot certainly wanted to “give in” to Hamas in November when it offered fewer and different hostages to extend the ceasefire at the time, whereas Gallant stood clearly with Netanyahu opposed to letting Hamas make any change.
Further, the Post knows that Gallant insisted on taking apart Hamas in Khan Yunis and in Rafah before entertaining an extended ceasefire, let alone an end to the war.
Disagreements over whether to leave Hamas in power
However, once Khan Yunis and Rafah were subdued, the Post has learned that Gallant stood with the majority of the IDF establishment whose message was there was no large organized Hamas force left to fight, such that ending the war was not much of a concession to make to get back hostages.
According to this thinking, the five IDF reinvasions of parts of Gaza are large-scale “raids” like the iDF routinely does in the West Bank, and are not really invasions.
In a manner of speaking, Gallant and the IDF view the serious fighting stage of the war as already being over, regardless of what political slogans are running around about refusing to end the war.
According to Gallant then, this is the moment to get back as many hostages as possible.
ANY DELAY or obfuscation or attempt to stiffen the terms of the deal now, according to Gallant, is a political move which directly and unnecessarily endangers the hostages lives, the Post understands.
This is also the view of the IDF high command who were stunned by Netanyahu’s new conditions that he made public on Sunday night and contradict significant aspects of the deal to which Israel had already nominally agreed.
It is possible that Netanyahu will agree to a hostage exchange and that this statement was just for public consumption.
Some also think that if his words are carefully parsed he left many openings for a deal.
For example, he said only that “armed” Hamas members could not return to northern Gaza, but said nothing about unarmed ones – a possible fiction created to claim that northern Gaza is disarmed, while allowing Hamas to return.
But what bothers Gallant the most about Netanyahu’s actions and statements – including his trying to connect the hostage deal to negotiations over haredim integrating into the IDF – is a realization that Netanyahu is possibly dead set against a final deal which returns all of the hostages.
If this is true, then the only question is whether Netanyahu at least wants a partial deal, something he slipped into admitting in a Channel 14 interview a couple of weeks ago – or whether he wants no deal so as to act as if the war is continuing, but to try to find a way to blame Hamas (not that hard given they are a horrific terror organization who took the hostages and slaughtered 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians on October 7.)
This could mean Netanyahu’s end game is to keep Hamas in power as long as he feels it is “weakened enough” and as long as he can keep ordering the IDF to launch raids that look like war to his critics on the Right.
In addition, this could buy time to push off elections and continue to change the subject from blaming him for October 7, along with the IDF and the rest of the defense establishment.
All of this is nothing short of revolting to Gallant, who was never much of a political animal who both wanted to rout Hamas, but vehemently also to return all of the Israeli hostages or at least genuinely leave no stone unturned to try to achieve that.
The next question then is whether Gallant would consider resigning if he feels Netanyahu torpedoed the deal, and whether this threat could push Netanyahu to comply with the deal, at least long enough to get a first batch of hostages back in “Phase 1” of the proposed exchange.