Since June 9 and the resignation of his centrist allies from the government, Benjamin Netanyahu has been waging war on his own. A mere formality, the Israeli prime minister finally acknowledged this state of affairs by announcing the dissolution of the war cabinet to his ministers on Sunday, June 16.

This restricted body was created in October 2023, by an agreement with generals Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot. These two former chiefs of the General Staff from the centrist opposition had agreed to join the government after the Hamas attack in the south of the country on October 7, 2023, on the condition that a small cabinet take charge of operations. They demanded the exclusion of religious fundamentalist ministers from Netanyahu's coalition, whom they considered a threat to the state.

The late and lackluster departure of the two generals effectively rendered this body obsolete. They themselves already considered it impotent. They regretted their inability to influence the choices, or non-choices, of a prime minister reluctant to make any irrevocable decisions. Following Netanyahu's announcement on Monday, his Minister of National Security, the supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir, will no longer be able to clamor for his own seat in the war cabinet.

The prime minister is expected to keep a tight circle of collaborators around him: Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi, minister without Portfolio and Netanyahu's "second brain" Ron Dermer, as well as the boss of the ultra-Orthodox Shass party, Arié Déri. In doing so, he is returning to a governing practice established since the late 2010s, a period marked by an increasingly solitary exercise of power, following the exclusion or departure of autonomous and experienced figures from the Likud party.

As in the past, this circle will have to obtain approval for its major decisions from the Security Cabinet, a long-established body that brings together the key ministers for major security affairs. Ben-Gvir and his cohorts exerted a growing influence in this body. Netanyahu regularly postponed these meetings, whose heated debates regularly leaked to the press.

In recent days, the two resigning generals have expressed, in interviews on Israeli television, their displeasure with a government "penetrated" by "ulterior motives and political considerations," in the words of Eisenkot, who described Ben-Gvir as "the alternate prime minister." Gantz, favorite in the polls with slowly declining ratings, claimed that these calculations had led to the postponement of a possible agreement with Hamas, supposed to allow the release of some of the Islamist movement's hostages.

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