Gaza: Netanyahu Disbands War Cabinet

After months of uncertainty, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has disbanded the country’s war cabinet, amid the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza.

This decision is coming barely a week after the resignation of opposition leader Grantz from the ruling coalition, a move that exposed deep divisions within the Israeli coalition.

The Israeli government said it will on a daily basis “pause” military action in Southern Gaza to enable essential items to come in for the needy. It however, noted that military operations in and around the city of Rafah will continue until it achieves its aim of routing Hamas militants and dismantling their military capabilities.

Israel said that it has discovered so many tunnel shafts from which Hamas smuggled weapons from Egypt into Rafah, but the fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, deepening an already dire humanitarian crisis.

Although the US President proposed a ceasefire to end the war in Gaza, both Israel and Hamas have differed on so many terms of the deal.

The war erupted after the October 7, 2023 attack against Israeli citizens by Hamas, which killed 1,200 and abducted over 200 others. Israel’s retaliatory war has so far killed over 36,000 people and injured over 80, 000 others according to Hamas controlled- Health Ministry.

More than 1.3 million people are believed to have been displaced from Rafah to other parts of Gaza in a span of six weeks, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

“UNRWA estimates that 65,000 people are sheltering in Rafah,” it said on X. “Six weeks ago there were around 1.4 million,” it added.

Israel has also escalated action against the Iranian- backed paramilitary group Hezbollah after months of clashes at the Lebanese border and these clashes are threatening to snowball into a bigger conflict within the troubled region.