Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, sidelining a powerful security voice who has helped lead the Jewish state’s yearlong war against Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iran-backed forces.
Netanyahu, citing irreconcilable differences with his longtime defense minister, said that trust between the two leaders shattered in recent months as Gallant began publicly criticizing the prime minister’s handling of the war in Gaza.
“Unfortunately, although in the first months of the war there was trust and there was very fruitful work, during the last months this trust cracked between me and the defense minister,” Netanyahu said Tuesday in a videotaped message.
Netanyahu said that while he attempted to “bridge these gaps” with Gallant, “they kept getting wider,” resulting in the decision to replace him with foreign minister Israel Katz. Netanyahu insinuated that Gallant is behind a series of national security leaks that have roiled the Jewish state.
Internal disagreements over the country’s war effort, Netanyahu said, “came to the knowledge of the public in an unacceptable way, and worse than that, they came to the knowledge of the enemy—our enemies enjoyed it and derived a lot of benefit from it.”
Gallant’s term as defense minister will come to a close in the next two days. He said in a brief statement on X that “the security of the State of Israel was and will always remain my life’s mission.”
Gallant’s dismissal comes at a precarious political time in Israel, with tensions simmering over a proposal to draft thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military. Gallant reportedly backed the proposal, bucking Netanyahu-backed legislation that would have extended the religious community’s immunity from the draft.
“Gallant’s exit was inevitable,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a Middle East analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, citing long-standing “tensions between the departing defense minister and Netanyahu [that] pre-date the war.”
Gallant, however, should be credited “with leading the Israeli defense establishment through the tough, early days of this war,” Schanzer said.
This is not the first time Netanyahu has fired Gallant. He did so last year after Gallant called to pause a judicial reform bill. The move prompted protests, and Netanyahu reinstated Gallant weeks later.
