JERUSALEM: Leaders of the ruling coalition in Israel said on Monday they would introduce a bill next week to dissolve parliament, which if approved, would force fresh elections.
“After ending all efforts to stabilize the coalition, Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and … (Foreign Minister) Yair Lapid will next week “a bill to dissolve parliament,” two of the coalition’s key allies said in a statement. Decided to submit
He also said that if the bill is approved, Lapid will take over as the head of a caretaker government.
If that happens, Lapid will host US President Joe Biden during his scheduled visit to Israel next month.
The ideologically divided eight-party coalition was formed a year earlier and includes religious nationalists, such as Bennett, MPs from Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party, leftists and, for the first time in Israel’s history, an Arab Islamist party.
But the coalition, united to end the term of divisive leader Benjamin Netanyahu, was under threat from its inception.
It lost its majority in Israel’s 120-seat parliament in April when a member of Bennett’s Yamina party announced its departure.
Recent divisions over the renewal of a measure that would allow Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank to live under Israeli law, with some leftists refusing to back it.
This was a curse for hardliners in the coalition, particularly Justice Minister Gideon Saar, who rejected any notion that West Bank settlers lived outside Israel.
The Netanyahu-led opposition warned it would introduce its own bill to dissolve parliament on Wednesday, but Bennett and Lapid have moved to pre-empt that opposition move.
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