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Likud minister Ze’ev Elkin will leave Benjamin Netanyahu’s party and join Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope ahead of the March 2021 elections, Channel 12 reports.
Ze’ev Elkin, at the time leaving his position as environmental protection minister, speaks at a ceremony at the Ministry of Environmental in Jerusalem on May 18, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) I m proud to work at The Times of Israel
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Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi says there’s “no way” his party would recommend that New Hope leader Gideon Sa’ar be tasked with forming the next coalition following the March 2021 elections.
After the vote, the president consults with all political parties and gathers their recommendations for the next prime minister. The Joint List recommended Benny Gantz after the previous election, only to see the centrist former IDF chief join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Illustrative: Joint List party member Ahmad Tibi speaks during a Knesset plenary session on February 17, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“There is no way we would recommend Gideon Sa’ar for the premiership,” Tibi tells Army Radio. “You don’t always have to recommend someone. Instead of recommending generals, should we go with the worst inciters against the Arabs?”
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The weekly cabinet meeting, which had been pushed off this week to tomorrow, faces an additional delay until Thursday amid disagreements between the Likud and Blue and White parties over the agenda, Hebrew-language media reports.
The government is expected to be dissolved next week and elections called for the fourth time in under two years. I m proud to work at The Times of Israel
I’ll tell you the truth: Life here in Israel isn’t always easy. But it s full of beauty and meaning.
I m proud to work at The Times of Israel alongside colleagues who pour their hearts into their work day in, day out, to capture the complexity of this extraordinary place.
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The United States places a pro-Iranian group based in Bahrain on its global terror blacklist, accusing it of plotting attacks on US troops in the tiny Gulf kingdom.
The group, Saraya al-Mukhtar, poses a “significant risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says in a statement.
“Saraya al-Mukhtar is an Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Bahrain, reportedly receiving financial and logistic support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” Pompeo says.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have been on the US “Designated Global Terrorist” list since 2019.
Health Minister Yuli Edelstein says that Israel is heading towards closing down commerce throughout the country due to a continued rise in infections.
“We are going towards closing trade, in accordance with the data,” he tells the Kan public broadcaster, referring to the more than 2,200 daily cases confirmed yesterday.
“As a government, we made decisions about very clear criteria for starting the ‘tightened restraint’ restrictions 2,500 patients per day or a basic reproduction number over 1.32.”
The basic reproduction number a key epidemiological benchmark representing the average number of people each virus carrier infects currently stands at 1.16, according to a taskforce report from this morning.