Israeli army says Netanyahu seeks to 'escalate' regional wars to delay elections.
Netanyahu's Likud party has slipped in the polls, threatening the prime minister's bid to retain power after the Knesset elections in October
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to escalate the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and initiate new wars in West Asia to “disrupt or delay” upcoming Knesset elections, Israeli army officials told Maariv on 22 August.
The unnamed officials warned that Netanyahu does not want military operations in Gaza to end and could escalate attacks on Palestinians for political reasons as elections approach.
“We will not enter a new and unnecessary war,” the officials said.
Military officials say the army, which relies heavily on reservists, is short on manpowerneeded to illegally occupy territory in “security zones” in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.
Netanyahu faces an uphill battle to retain his position as prime minister. Polls suggest his Likud party could lose a third of its seats, Reuters reported last week.
Likud’s popularity has plummeted since the Palestinian resistance launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023.
Many Israelis blame Netanyahu for the alleged intelligence failure that led to the attack, which saw the activation of the Hannibal Directive multiple times that day, resulting in the deaths of roughly 1,200 Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Israel Katz have recently escalated their rhetoric against Turkiye ahead of the elections.
Ankara and Tel Aviv often criticize one another in public while cooperating in private.
Turkiye supplies much of Israel’s oil, which is imported from Azerbaijan and loaded onto ships at the Ceyhan port for delivery to Israeli refineries in Ashkelon and Haifa.
Israeli opposition figures, including former prime minister Ehud Barak and Democrats party leader Yair Golan, have accused Netanyahu of deliberately escalating tensions with Ankara for political benefit.
On Tuesday, Israel bombed the Abu al-Duhur military airbase in northern Syria, claiming that Turkiye had deployed troops there.
“We will not tolerate a Turkish military entrenchment moving southward, because it threatens us,” the Israeli prime minister warned.
Eight Israeli strikes targeted the airport runway and storage facility, according to Syrian state TV. No injuries were reported.
In phone conversations in the days before the attack, Syrian Foreign Minister and former Al-Qaeda member Assad al-Shaibani told Mossad chief Roman Goffman that no Turkish presence at the base existed.
Since ousting Bashar al-Assad in 2024, Syria’s new government, led by former Al-Qaeda in Syria founder Ahmad al-Sharaa, has opened lines of communication with Israel in a bid to reach a security agreement.
Sharaa has insisted he will not confront Israel militarily over its occupation of additional Syrian territory and daily raids by Israeli troops into southern Syria since he came to power with strong US, Turkish, and Israeli backing.