“I don’t think that changing the prime minister now is what will advance and help my son to come home,” Sheli Shem Tov, whose son Omer was kidnapped from a music festival, told Israel’s Channel 12. “To go to elections now will just push to the side the most burning issue, which is to return the hostages home.”
In his Sunday address, Netanyahu also repeated his vow for a military ground offensive in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than half of territory’s population of 2.3 million now shelters after fleeing fighting elsewhere.
“There is no victory without going into Rafah,” he said, adding that US pressure would not deter him. Israel’s military says Hamas battalions remain there.
