{"id":300165,"date":"2026-02-20T01:20:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T01:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/300165\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T01:20:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T01:20:13","slug":"hamas-allegedly-wanted-netanyahus-re-election-in-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/300165\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamas allegedly wanted Netanyahu’s re-election in 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hamas<\/a> had allegedly unsuccessfully attempted to influence Ra\u2019am head Mansour Abbas to join a government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2021, Israeli journalist Amit Segal reported on Thursday.<\/p>\n

According to Segal, a senior Hamas official had called Ra’am<\/a> leader Mansour Abbas from Qatar, allegedly demanding he aid Netanyahu retain the premiership.<\/p>\n

The official reportedly believed that “Netanyahu was looking for continued calm and quiet understandings, while a new government would be dragged into an operation in the Gaza Strip.”<\/p>\n

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett then backed Segal’s claim on X\/Twitter, emphasizing that “this is not a claim made by political rivals, it is not a theory, these are the facts that Amit Segal has just exposed.”<\/p>\n

“The same senior Hamas official explicitly asked Abbas not to join Bennett, because they were afraid of a government led by me and knew it would not allow them to arm themselves and slaughter us, as they did on October 7.”<\/p>\n

On Thursday, Bennett said he would not boycott<\/a> National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (Otzma Yehudit) and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party), according to leaked recordings released that day.<\/p>\n

The comments sparked speculation that he would be willing to form a government with right-wing party leaders after the upcoming elections, scheduled to take place no later than October.<\/p>\n

Regarding his term as prime minister that began in 2021, Bennett said he had invited Smotrich to join his government.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Smotrich had come, there would have been no need to rely on an Arab party,\u201d he said. \u201cBut he preferred that I rely on an Arab party so that he could get angry about it, rather than come and be part of the solution. So, this boycott needs to be broken.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bennett became prime minister in June 2021 and entered a rotation government with opposition leader Yair Lapid<\/a> (Yesh Atid). His government was the first in Israel\u2019s history to include an Arab party.<\/p>\n

It added the Ra\u2019am Party to the coalition in a controversial move that is cited in the current round of elections.<\/p>\n

Keshet Neev contributed to this report.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hamas had allegedly unsuccessfully attempted to influence Ra\u2019am head Mansour Abbas to join a government led by Prime…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[49,1982,51,42,837,101649,953,43,101650,58,40,38,41,39,19344],"class_list":{"0":"post-300165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-benjamin-netanyahu","9":"tag-bezalel-smotrich","10":"tag-hamas","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-itamar-ben-gvir","13":"tag-mansour-abbas","14":"tag-naftali-bennett","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-raam","17":"tag-the-october-7-massacre","18":"tag-top-news","19":"tag-top-stories","20":"tag-topnews","21":"tag-topstories","22":"tag-yair-lapid"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}