Tough-talking new foreign minister Binyamin Netanyahu was to be sworn in on Wednesday as Israel prepares for early elections which the right is tipped to win, while in the Gaza Strip an armed Palestinian kills two Jewish settlers before being shot dead.
The hawkish Netanyahu on Tuesday accepted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s offer to become foreign minister in the caretaker government ahead of elections to be held in late January, providing him with a strong platform for his bid to regain the premiership he held from 1996 to 1999.
He immediately hurled himself onto the campaign trail. Speaking on public television late on Tuesday ”Bibi” said he regretted that Israel had not already expelled Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in retaliation for Palestinian suicide attacks.
Netanyahu said a US strike on Iraq would provide an ideal cover to oust Arafat during the upheaval in the region. Such an operation would ”enable us to get rid of Saddam Hussein and provide a good opportunity to get rid of Arafat”, Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu, who has made no secret of his ambition to run against Sharon in Likud party primaries, said the right-wing party would win a sweeping victory after the leadership run-off is held.
”I am convinced that the crushing majority coalition that the Likud will set up can put us on the right path to bring the country solutions over the next four years,” Netanyahu said.
A newspaper poll published on Wednesday showed that a right-wing coalition including religious parties and far-right hardliners will win the early polls.
Sharon, Netanyahu’s rival in the Likud party, said the early elections had been forced upon him by the ”irresponsible” decision of the Labour party last week to scuttle Israel’s national unity government.
”Elections are not what the state needs,” said Sharon, but stressed that after Labour’s walkout and the ”unacceptable” demands of far-right parties to form a new coalition, they were ”the least damaging option.”
Sharon accused Labour of putting ”irresponsible political reasons” ahead of national interest by quitting in a row over funding of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
”We are facing difficult challenges today, perhaps more complex than we have ever faced,” said the hardliner, whose 20-month national unity coalition collapsed on October 30.
Labour leader Binyamin Bin Eliezer has said his party would focus on social issues in the election campaign. Ben Eliezer, whose resignation as defence minister sparked the political crisis, slammed Sharon’s failure to tackle social issues as the country wallows in its worst-ever economic crisis, with one in five Israelis living in poverty.
”Two years of nothing — no political, social or economic achievements. Never has a prime minister enjoyed the support of so many, and done so little,” Ben Eliezer told reporters. Sharon’s announcement will trigger internal elections in both main parties, Likud and Labour.
The Likud leadership vote, which The Jerusalem Post daily said must be held by December 5 at the latest, is likely to be a close, cut-throat affair, while Labour’s Ben Eliezer is trailing behind his two left-wing rivals in popularity and is likely to be dumped.
As if to underline the problems which any new administration will face, the violence on the ground continued unabated during the internal wrangling over election dates.
A Palestinian gunman from the radical Islamic movement Hamas killed two Jewish settlers before being shot dead near the settlement of Rafah Yam in the southern Gaza Strip.
Israeli government representative Avi Pazner said the attack was intended to destabilise the Jewish state at a time when it is facing internal upheavals with the early elections.
Late on Tuesday, two young Palestinians were killed by Israeli tank fire in Rafah on the Egypt-Gaza border, after a crowd of youths pelted tanks and bulldozers with stones.
Two other Palestinians were critically wounded. And a suspected suicide bomber was arrested overnight after a manhunt around Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. – Sapa-AFP