Former Israeli national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has reentered Israel’s politics as Gaza conflict continues to surge.
Ben-Gvir’s planned return to government reportedly brings back a West Bank settler who has pressed for an intensification of the war in the Gaza Strip, even as the Palestinian death toll has exceeded 48,000.
The announcement by Ben-Gvir, once a lynchpin of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist-religious cabinet, came amid airstrikes on Gaza that shattered weeks of relative calm after talks with the Palestinians stalled over a permanent ceasefire.
It could be recalled that in January, when he was national security minister, Ben-Gvir resigned from the government over disagreements about the ceasefire.
His return is said to have strengthened a coalition that had been left with a thin parliamentary majority when he departed.
The 48-year-old Ben-Gvir was known as a hardline extremist even before he helped Netanyahu form the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history.
While in the cabinet, he repeatedly attacked the army and Netanyahu over the conduct of the war in Gaza, opposing any deal with Hamas and threatening at times to bring down the government if it did a deal to end the war without destroying Hamas.
Together with a fellow hardliner, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, he has clashed repeatedly with Netanyahu.
Both have called for the permanent conquest of Gaza and re-establishment of the Jewish settlements there which Israel abandoned in 2005, notions that Netanyahu has rejected.
