Israel’s Wartime Cabinet Is Rattled by a Dispute between Netanyahu and His Top Political Rival

A top Israeli Cabinet minister headed to Washington on Sunday for talks with US officials, sparking a rebuke from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to an Israeli official, in a sign of widening cracks in Israel's wartime government nearly five months into its war with Hamas.

The trip by Benny Gantz, a centrist political rival who joined Netanyahu’s hard-line government in the early days of the war following Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, comes amid deep disagreements between Netanyahu and President Joe Biden over how to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and create a post-war vision for the enclave.

The US was prompted to airdrop aid into Gaza on Saturday after dozens of Palestinians rushing to grab food from trucks were killed last week. The airdrops circumvent what’s been a prohibitive aid delivery system, which has been hobbled by Israeli restrictions, logistical issues within Gaza as well as the fighting inside the tiny enclave. Aid officials say the airdrops are far less effective than the aid sent via trucks.

US priorities in the region have increasingly been hampered by Netanyahu’s hard-line Cabinet, where ultranationalists dominate. Gantz’s more moderate party at times acts as a counterweight to Netanyahu's far-right allies.

An official from Netanyahu’s Likud party said Gantz’s visit was without authorization from the Israeli leader. The official said Netanyahu had a “tough talk” with Gantz about the trip and told him the country has “just one prime minister.”

An Israeli official said Gantz had informed Netanyahu of his intention to travel to the US and to coordinate messaging with him. The official said the visit is meant to strengthen ties with Washington, to bolster support for Israel's ground campaign and to push for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

Gantz is set to meet with US Vice President Kamala Harris and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, according to his National Unity party.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the dispute with the media.

Netanyahu has tanked in popularity since the war broke out, according to most opinion polls, with many Israelis holding him responsible for Hamas’ cross-border raid that left 1,200 people, mostly civilians, dead and roughly 250 people, including women, children and older adults, abducted and taken into Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.

The subsequent fighting has killed at least 30,410 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and fighters. Around 80% of the population of 2.3 million have fled their homes, and UN agencies say hundreds of thousands are on the brink of famine.

Critics say Netanyahu’s decision-making has been tainted by political considerations, a charge he denies. The criticism is particularly focused on plans for postwar Gaza. Netanyahu has released a proposal that would see Israel maintain open-ended security control over the territory with local Palestinians running civilian affairs.

The US wants to see progress on the creation of a Palestinian state, envisioning a revamped Palestinian leadership running Gaza with an eye toward eventual statehood.

That vision is opposed by Netanyahu and the hard-liners in his government. Another top Cabinet official from Gantz's party has questioned the handling of the war and the country's strategy for freeing the hostages.

Netanyahu's government, Israel's most conservative and religious ever, has also been rattled by a court-ordered deadline for a new bill to broaden military enlistment of ultra-Orthodox Jews, many of whom are exempted to pursue religious studies. The issue has come up as hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed since Oct. 7 and the military is looking to fill its ranks as the war drags on.

Gantz, who polls show would earn enough support to become prime minister if a vote were held today, is viewed as a political moderate. But he has remained vague about his view of Palestinian statehood.

A visit to the US, if met with progress on the hostage front, could further boost Gantz’s support. Israel has essentially endorsed a framework of a proposed Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal, and it is now up to Hamas to agree to it, a senior US official said Saturday. He spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House to brief reporters.

Israelis, deeply traumatized by Hamas’ attack, have broadly backed the war effort as an act of self-defense, even as global opposition to the fighting has increased.

But a growing number are expressing their dismay with Netanyahu. Some 10,000 people protested late Saturday to call for early elections, according to Israeli media. Such protests have grown in recent weeks, but remain much smaller than last year's demonstrations against the government's judicial overhaul plan.

If the political rifts grow and Gantz quits the government, the floodgates will open to broader protests by a public that was already unhappy with the government when Hamas struck, said Reuven Hazan, a professor of political science at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.

“There is a lot of anger,” he said, listing grievances that were building well before Oct. 7. “The moment you have that anger and a coalition that is disconnected from the people, there will be fireworks.”

Netanyahu's government won't collapse if Gantz exits, but it could lose legitimacy in the eyes of much of the public.

Talks aimed at brokering a Gaza ceasefire restarted Sunday in Egypt. International mediators hope to broker a deal that would pause the fighting and free some of the remaining hostages before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins around March 10.

In the meantime, fighting raged on in Gaza with Israeli strikes late Saturday killing more than 30 people, including women and children, according to local health officials.

At least 14 were killed in a strike on a home in the southernmost city of Rafah, on the Egyptian border, according to Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of the hospital where the bodies were taken. He said the dead, including six children and four women, were all from the same family. Relatives said another nine people were missing under the rubble.

Israeli airstrikes also hit two homes in the Jabaliya refugee camp, a dense, residential area in northern Gaza, killing 17 people, according to the Civil Defense.

Golden fields of wheat no longer produce the bounty they once did in Morocco. A six-year drought has imperiled the country's entire agriculture sector, including farmers who grow cereals and grains used to feed humans and livestock.

The North African nation projects this year's harvest will be smaller than last year in both volume and acreage, putting farmers out of work and requiring more imports and government subsidies to prevent the price of staples like flour from rising for everyday consumers.

"In the past, we used to have a bounty — a lot of wheat. But during the last seven or eight years, the harvest has been very low because of the drought," said Al Housni Belhoussni, a small-scale farmer who has long tilled fields outside of the city of Kenitra.

Belhoussni's plight is familiar to grain farmers throughout the world confronting a hotter and drier future. Climate change is imperiling the food supply and shrinking the annual yields of cereals that dominate diets around the world — wheat, rice, maize and barley.

In North Africa, among the regions thought of as most vulnerable to climate change, delays to annual rains and inconsistent weather patterns have pushed the growing season later in the year and made planning difficult for farmers.

In Morocco, where cereals account for most of the farmed land and agriculture employs the majority of workers in rural regions, the drought is wreaking havoc and touching off major changes that will transform the makeup of the economy. It has forced some to leave their fields fallow. It has also made the areas they do elect to cultivate less productive, producing far fewer sacks of wheat to sell than they once did.

In response, the government has announced restrictions on water use in urban areas — including on public baths and car washes — and in rural ones, where water going to farms has been rationed.

"The late rains during the autumn season affected the agriculture campaign. This year, only the spring rains, especially during the month of March, managed to rescue the crops," said Abdelkrim Naaman, the chairman of Nalsya. The organization has advised farmers on seeding, irrigation and drought mitigation as less rain falls and less water flows through Morocco's rivers.

The Agriculture Ministry estimates that this year's wheat harvest will yield roughly 3.4 million tons (3.1 billion kilograms), far less than last year's 6.1 million tons (5.5 billion kilograms) — a yield that was still considered low. The amount of land seeded has dramatically shrunk as well, from 14,170 square miles (36,700 square kilometers) to 9,540 square miles (24,700 square kilometers).

Such a drop constitutes a crisis, said Driss Aissaoui, an analyst and former member of the Moroccan Ministry for Agriculture.

"When we say crisis, this means that you have to import more," he said. "We are in a country where drought has become a structural issue."

Leaning more on imports means the government will have to continue subsidizing prices to ensure households and livestock farmers can afford dietary staples for their families and flocks, said Rachid Benali, the chairman of the farming lobby COMADER.

The country imported nearly 2.5 million tons of common wheat between January and June. However, such a solution may have an expiration date, particularly because Morocco's primary source of wheat, France, is facing shrinking harvests as well.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization ranked Morocco as the world's sixth-largest wheat importer this year, between Türkiye and Bangladesh, which both have much bigger populations.

"Morocco has known droughts like this and in some cases known droughts that las longer than 10 years. But the problem, this time especially, is climate change," Benali said.

Israel’s Wartime Cabinet Is Rattled by a Dispute between Netanyahu and His Top Political Rival