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Israel’s New Defense Minister: Netanyahu Loyalist, Settlers’ Friend 

A file photo taken on March 26, 2010 shows Israeli officer general Yoav Galant, chief of the south command, during a press conference near the border with the Gaza Strip. (AFP)
A file photo taken on March 26, 2010 shows Israeli officer general Yoav Galant, chief of the south command, during a press conference near the border with the Gaza Strip. (AFP)
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Israel’s New Defense Minister: Netanyahu Loyalist, Settlers’ Friend 

A file photo taken on March 26, 2010 shows Israeli officer general Yoav Galant, chief of the south command, during a press conference near the border with the Gaza Strip. (AFP)
A file photo taken on March 26, 2010 shows Israeli officer general Yoav Galant, chief of the south command, during a press conference near the border with the Gaza Strip. (AFP)

Israel's new defense minister Yoav Galant is a former general, a staunch ally of Benjamin Netanyahu and a vocal advocate of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. 

In the military, the 64-year-old oversaw Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and later commanded the "Operation Cast Lead" offensive against its Hamas rulers in 2008-2009.  

Since entering politics in 2015, he has served as minister for education, housing and immigration -- and has been a prominent backer of Israel's settlements, regarded as illegal under international law, that are today home to some 475,000 settlers. 

Some observers fear a radical change in policy on the occupied West Bank under Netanyahu's new government. 

Shlomo Neeman, who heads the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, welcomed Galant ahead of his appointment on Thursday. 

"Yoav Galant is a man who has done a lot for the settlement of Judea and Samaria," he said, using the Jewish biblical terms for the West Bank. 

Ahead of his nomination, Galant's predecessor Benny Gantz spoke with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, stressing "the important ties forged between the Israeli defense establishment and political echelon and the Palestinian Authority".  

Galant, born in the Mediterranean port of Jaffa in 1958 to Polish Holocaust survivors, was a career soldier.  

He was an officer in the elite marine unite known as Flotilla-13 when it carried out an operation against the Palestinian Fatah movement in Lebanon in 1978.  

The unit killed around 20 Palestinian gunmen, etching the operation into the Israeli military's history books.  

Top general  

Between 1982 and 1984, Galant took a break from the army to become a lumberjack in Alaska.  

Galant reached the rank of general in 2002, serving as former prime minister Ariel Sharon's military attaché.  

Galant would later rise to become commander of the southern military command, overseeing Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, including the evacuation of 8,000 settlers from the Palestinian enclave. 

He then commanded Israel's "Operation Cast Lead", a 22-day operation in Gaza that killed 1,440 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.  

A United Nations report accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes during that conflict.  

Nominated as the army's chief of staff in 2010, Galant was mired in scandal over the appropriation of public land to build his house.  

An investigative report led to a petition in the supreme court which did not result in criminal charges, but posed potential legal problems to his appointment.  

Instead, Benny Gantz, whom Galant now succeeds at the defense ministry, was selected.  

After leaving the army, he became director of a drilling company owned by Franco-Israeli tycoon Beny Steinmetz, but resigned in 2014 to enter politics.  

In 2015, Galant served as housing minister as part of the center-right Kulanu party, though he later joined Netanyahu's right-wing Likud in 2019.  

Under previous Netanyahu governments, Galant served as both immigration and education minister between 2019 and 2021. 

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Climate Change Imperils Drought-Stricken Morocco’s Cereal Farmers and Its Food Supply

A farmer works in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kenitra, Morocco, Friday, June 21, 2024. (AP)
A farmer works in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kenitra, Morocco, Friday, June 21, 2024. (AP)
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Climate Change Imperils Drought-Stricken Morocco’s Cereal Farmers and Its Food Supply

A farmer works in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kenitra, Morocco, Friday, June 21, 2024. (AP)
A farmer works in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kenitra, Morocco, Friday, June 21, 2024. (AP)

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.