‘No one trusts Netanyahu’: Israel’s war cabinet divided amid Gaza conflict

Signs of the rift within Israel’s establishment deepen even as Netanyahu declares the next phase of the war in Gaza.
It took one tweet over the weekend for cracks to emerge within the Israeli political establishment.
Just after midnight on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote that he had never been informed about warnings of Hamas’s assault on Israel on October 7. Netanyahu instead seemed to place the blame for the attack, where at least 1,400 people were killed, on his army and intelligence chiefs. They had assessed prior to the attack that Hamas “was deterred and ready for a settlement”, he noted.The statement caused an uproar. Political leaders slammed Netanyahu for playing politics while the country was in the midst of a difficult military campaign inside Gaza. The outrage was such that the prime minister deleted the tweet, and in an unusually sober tone, apologised for his words. “I was wrong,” he said.
Experts say the episode confirmed a widening rift within the political and military establishment, one that questioned Netanyahu’s leadership and his capacity to navigate the country through war without prioritising his own interests over national security.“To say that he was out of order would be the understatement of the year,” said Yossi Mekelberg, associate fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House.
“This is a very difficult military campaign so you want a responsible prime minister and there is not a single person [in the government] that trusts Netanyahu – that’s the main issue for this cabinet,” Mekelberg said….Source: aljazeera.com