Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was to face a key showdown with his Labour party yesterday because he was to ask the deeply divided faction to back a coalition deal with prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu.
Barak and the hawkish Netanyahu reached an accord after personally overseeing negotiations that began in the small hours of the morning, Israeli radio reported.
In the deal, Labour — the once-dominant party that suffered its worst-ever election showing in last month’s general election — would secure five ministries in a Netanyahu Cabinet.
Barak, Israel’s most highly decorated soldier, will keep the defense portfolio, the radio reported.
The move would give Netanyahu a broad-based coalition government that he favors over a narrow right-wing Cabinet that may not be able to survive for long in the turbulent world of Israeli politics. In the agreement, Netanyahu would commit to continuing peace negotiations with the Palestinians and to respect past deals, the radio said.
The future government would also commit to work against so-called wildcat settlements in the occupied West Bank — those not authorized by the Israeli government, it reported.
Netanyahu, who has until April 3 to form a government, has already signed coalition agreements with the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party and the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.
These give him the support of 53 members of parliament (MPs) — 27 from Likud, 15 from Yisrael Beitenu and 11 from Shas. If Labour votes to join, he would have a four-member coalition of 66 deputies in the 120-member parliament.
But the decision on whether to approve the agreement threatens to split Labour down the middle, as many in the party — now the fourth-largest in parliament — oppose joining a Cabinet led by Bibi, as Netanyahu is widely known in Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel’s military condemned soldiers for wearing T-shirts of a pregnant woman in a rifle’s cross-hairs with the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills,” and another of a gun-toting child with the words, “The smaller they are, the harder it is.”
The T-shirts were worn by some Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers to mark the end of basic training and other military courses, the newspaper Haaretz said.
The appearance of the T-shirts followed allegations of misconduct by Israeli troops during the three-week Gaza war.
Palestinian officials said about 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. Thirteen Israelis died, three of them civilians.
The army said it would not tolerate the T-shirts and would take disciplinary action against the soldiers involved, although it was not clear how many wore the shirts or how widely they were distributed.
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