Israeli Defense Minister Joav Gallant (center) with soldiers deployed in southern Israel along the border with the Gaza Strip.
Image: dpa
The Israeli Defense Minister is considered one of the few non-ideological politicians in Netanyahu’s cabinet. Now he has to take political responsibility for the upcoming ground offensive.
Since the Hamas massacres of civilians in southern Israel, Defense Minister Joav Gallant has been beating the war drum. He announced that the army would dismantle the terrorist organization, which he called “the ‘Islamic State’ of Gaza.” He showed NATO defense ministers an uncensored video of some of the atrocities at a virtual meeting on Thursday. Just two days after the major attack by Hamas, Gallant said that the Gaza Strip would be completely sealed off. There will be “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”. “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
Gallant comes from the military. At the end of last year, the American government allegedly put pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to appoint settler politician Bezalel Smotrich to the office. Netanyahu then found Gallant, who was born in Jaffa in 1958, and who has held several ministerial positions since 2015, first for the business-oriented Kulanu party and since 2018 for Netanyahu’s Likud.
#Israel #War #Portrait #Defense #Minister #Gallant