The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud, has announced this Tuesday that the current Foreign Affairs minister, Gideon Saar, will also take on the Interior portfolio, a position that the head of government himself had held since the resignation of Moshe Arbel in July 2025.
The party has indicated that Netanyahu will put to a vote tomorrow Saar’s appointment to this ministry, a responsibility that he already held between 2013 and 2014, before specifying that the post was first offered to Ofir Katz, who ultimately rejected the offer.
In this way, it has detailed that Katz justified his refusal by saying that he prefers to focus on his duties within the coalition led by Netanyahu, in a context in which the governing bloc has lost its majority in the Knesset following the legislative elections of October 27.
The Interior portfolio was left without a holder after Arbel’s resignation, a member of the ultra-Orthodox party Shas, as a sign of protest over the absence of progress in the approval of a law on the conscription of members of this community, one of the main sources of tension within the Executive.
Arbel’s departure forced Netanyahu to provisionally assume these responsibilities in the absence of a replacement, although the prime minister, in August, pressured by the Supreme Court, agreed that he had to appoint someone else to the post, which is expected to fall to Saar.
This move comes in a backdrop of wear and tear for Likud and its partners, since Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, assigned this weekend to the opposition figure Gadi Eisenkot the task of attempting to form a new government, having secured the support of more than 60 of the 120 deputies that emerged from the most recent elections.