Israeli minister Benny Gantz announced his resignation from prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s emergency government on Sunday, withdrawing the only centrist power in the embattled leader’s far-right coalition, amid the months-long war in Gaza.
Mr Gantz’s departure came as Israeli forces pounded central Gaza anew on Sunday, a day after killing a reported 274 Palestinians during a hostage rescue raid, and tanks advanced further into Rafah in an apparent bid to seal off part of the southern city.
Palestinians remained in shock over Saturday’s death toll, the worst over a 24-hour period of the Gaza war for months and including many women and children, Palestinian medics said.
Mr Netanyahu issued a brief statement calling on Mr Gantz not to “abandon the front” but his exit will not endanger the parliamentary majority of 64 seats in the 120-seat Knesset held by the ruling right-wing coalition.
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“Netanyahu is preventing us from advancing toward true victory. That is why we are leaving the emergency government today, with a heavy heart but with full confidence,” Mr Gantz said at a televised news conference.
His resignation had been expected ever since he presented the conservative prime minister with a June 8th deadline to come up with a clear day-after strategy for Gaza, where Israel has been pressing a devastating military offensive against the ruling Palestinian militant group Hamas.
The development means that Mr Netanyahu will lose the backing of a centrist bloc that has helped broaden support for the government in Israel and abroad, at a time of increasing diplomatic and domestic pressure eight months into the Gaza war.
Mr Gantz had originally been expected to announce his resignation on Saturday but pushed back the statement following the dramatic rescue of four hostages Israeli forces.
In an update on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said 274 Palestinians were killed – up from 210 it reported on Saturday – and 698 were injured in that operation, when Israeli special force commandos stormed into the densely populated Al-Nuseirat camp to rescue four hostages held since October by Hamas.
Sixty-four of the dead were children and 57 were women, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said on Sunday.
Israel’s military said a special forces officer was killed in exchanges of fire with militants emerging from cover in residential blocks, and that it knew of “under 100″ Palestinians killed, though not how many of them were fighters or civilians.
Hamas’s armed wing said on Sunday three Israeli hostages, including one with US citizenship, were killed during the raid, but provided no names. It released a video of what appeared to be corpses with censor bars obscuring their faces.
A Hamas assertion on Saturday that some hostages had died was rejected as “a blatant lie” by the Israeli military.
Gaza’s health ministry said another 798 Palestinians were injured in the Israeli raid, and one of them, four-year-old Tawfiq Abu Youssef, was in critical condition when visited in hospital on Sunday by his father Raed.
The boy was first thought to have died before he moved his hand slightly while in the arms of a relative rushing him to hospital – captured in a video that went viral on social media. “I had already dug his grave,” his father said, adding that most members of his extended family were killed in the raid.
In central Gaza on Sunday, Israeli air strikes on houses in the city of Deir Al-Balah and in the nearby Al-Bureij refugee camp killed three Palestinians in each location, while tanks shelled parts of Al-Nuseirat and Al-Maghazi camps, medics said.
The Israeli military said in a statement its forces were continuing operations east of Al-Bureij and Deir al-Balah, killing a number of Palestinian gunmen and destroying militant infrastructure.
Israel sent forces into Rafah in May in what it called a mission to wipe out Hamas’s last intact combat units after eight months of war, in which Israeli forces have bombed much of the rest of Gaza to rubble while advancing against fierce resistance from militants embedded in crowded cities and built-up camps.
Israeli tank forces have since seized Gaza’s entire border strip with Egypt running through Rafah to the Mediterranean coast and invaded many districts of the city of 280,000 residents, prompting around one million displaced people who had been sheltering in Rafah to flee elsewhere.
On Sunday, tanks advanced into two new districts in an apparent effort to complete the encirclement of the entire eastern side of Rafah, touching off clashes with dug-in Hamas-led armed groups, according to residents trapped in their homes.
Palestinian medics said an Israeli air strike on a house in Tel Al-Sultan in western Rafah killed two people.
The Israeli military said troops of its 162nd division were raiding some districts of Rafah where they had located “numerous additional terror tunnel shafts, mortars, and [other] weapons” belonging to Palestinian Islamist militants.
Hamas precipitated the war with a lightning cross-border attack into Israel on October 7th last, killing about 1,200 people and seizing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. About half the hostages were freed during a brief November truce.
Israel’s ensuing air and ground war in Gaza has killed at least 37,084 Palestinians, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said in its Sunday update. The ministry says thousands more dead are feared buried under the rubble.
Attempts by the United States and regional countries to broker a deal that would release all remaining hostages in return for a ceasefire have repeatedly stumbled due to Israeli and Hamas failure to agree on the terms for an end to the war.
A humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded as the war has dragged on, with more than three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.3 million population displaced, malnutrition widespread and basic infrastructure in ruins.
Gaza’s conflict has destabilised the wider Middle East, drawing in Hamas’s main supporter Iran and its Lebanese ally Hizbullah, which has been clashing with Israel along its northern border for months, raising fears of all-out war. – Reuters