JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday asked war cabinet minister Benny Gantz not to resign after threats to quit over the lack of post-war strategy for the Gaza Strip.
Gantz said last month he would resign from the emergency body if Netanyahu did not approve a post-war plan for Gaza by June 8.
“I call on Benny Gantz — do not leave the emergency government. Don’t give up on unity,” Netanyahu said on social media platform X.
Gantz canceled a news conference that was scheduled for Saturday, his office said, after the Israeli military said security forces had rescued four hostages alive from Gaza earlier in the day.
Without directly addressing speculations he had been planning to resign, Gantz appeared on Israeli television on Saturday evening after the captives were freed.
“Alongside the justified joy over this achievement, it should not be forgotten that all the challenges Israel is facing... have remained as they were,” Gantz said.
“Therefore, I say to the prime minister and the entire leadership — today, too, we must look responsibly at what is right and how we can continue from here.”
His centrist National Union Party submitted a bill last week to dissolve the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and hold early elections.
Gantz has been seen as a favorite to form a coalition in the event that Netanyahu’s government is brought down and early elections are called.
The former army chief, one of Netanyahu’s main rivals before he joined the war cabinet, had said this week that returning hostages from Gaza was a “priority.”
The army said Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, were rescued from central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday.
All four had been kidnapped by Hamas militants from the Nova music festival on October 7, the military said in a statement, adding the four had been taken to hospital and were in “good medical condition.”
During their October 7 attack on southern Israel, militants took 251 hostages, 116 of whom now remain in the Palestinian territory, including 41 the army says are dead.
The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory bombardments and ground offensive on Gaza have killed 36,801 people, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Israel PM asks war cabinet minister Gantz not to quit after ultimatum
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Israel PM asks war cabinet minister Gantz not to quit after ultimatum
- Gantz said last month he would resign from the emergency body if Netanyahu did not approve a post-war plan for Gaza
Syria’s leader set to visit Berlin with deportations in focus
- Sharaa is scheduled to meet his counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president’s office said
BERLIN: Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa is expected in Berlin on Tuesday for talks, as German officials seek to step up deportations of Syrians, despite unease about continued instability in their homeland.
Sharaa is scheduled to meet his counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president’s office said.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s office has yet to announce whether he would also hold talks with Sharaa during the visit.
Since ousting Syria’s longtime leader Bashar Assad in late 2024, Sharaa has made frequent overseas trips as the former Islamist rebel chief undergoes a rapid reinvention.
He has made official visits to the United States and France, and a series of international sanctions on Syria have been lifted.
The focus of next week’s visit for the German government will be on stepping up repatriations of Syrians, a priority for Merz’s conservative-led coalition since Assad was toppled.
Roughly one million Syrians fled to Germany in recent years, many of them arriving in 2015-16 to escape the civil war.
In November Merz, who fears being outflanked by the far-right AfD party on immigration, insisted there was “no longer any reason” for Syrians who fled the war to seek asylum in Germany.
“For those who refuse to return to their country, we can of course expel them,” he said.
- ‘Dramatic situation’ -
In December, Germany carried out its first deportation of a Syrian since the civil war erupted in 2011, flying a man convicted of crimes to Damascus.
But rights groups have criticized such efforts, citing continued instability in Syria and evidence of rights abuses.
Violence between the government and minority groups has repeatedly flared in multi-confessional Syria since Sharaa came to power, including recent clashes between the army and Kurdish forces.
Several NGOs, including those representing the Kurdish and Alawite Syrian communities in Germany, have urged Berlin to axe Sharaa’s planned visit, labelling it “totally unacceptable.”
“The situation in Syria is dramatic. Civilians are being persecuted solely on the basis of their ethnic or religious affiliation,” they said in a joint statement.
“It is incomprehensible to us and legally and morally unacceptable that the German government knowingly intends to receive a person suspected of being responsible for these acts at the chancellery.”
The Kurdish Community of Germany, among the signatories of that statement, also filed a complaint with German prosecutors in November, accusing Sharaa of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
There have also been voices urging caution within government.
On a trip to Damascus in October, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said that the potential for Syrians to return was “very limited” since the war had destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure.
But his comments triggered a backlash from his own conservative Christian Democratic Union party.
