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Earlier Tuesday, Likud MK and coronavirus committee chair Yifat Shasha-Biton, who has come in for criticism for her independence in the party in the past, announced that she is joining Sa ar s party. Shasha-Biton tweeted a photo of the two of them together, with the caption: “We’re on our way.”
Sa ar pledged earlier this week not to join a government led by Netanyahu, against whom he ran in a party primary earlier this year. Whoever wants Netanyahu to continue to be prime minister should not vote for me because I will under no circumstances support him, he said, adding that if Netanyahu wins the next election, Sa ar will sit in the opposition.
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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.
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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.
Coalition chair and head of the Likud Knesset faction Miki Zohar said he would “declare Shaha-Biton as a defector,” a quasi-legal term for an MK who leaves the party they were elected to represent and is therefore prevented from running on another’s list in the upcoming election.
“Her decision to run on another list revokes her right to represent the Likud faction in the Knesset,” he tweeted.
Shasha-Biton entered the Knesset in 2015 as a member of former finance minister Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu party, which was absorbed into Likud last year.
Following the formation of a new government in May, Shasha-Biton was named chairwoman of the Knesset’s Coronavirus Committee, where she earned popular acclaim for overturning and criticizing a number of the government’s coronavirus restrictions.