AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime’s lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to advance legislation to dissolve parliament and call an early election, after prime minister Naftali Bennett said his eight-party coalition was no longer tenable.
The cabinet has said it wants to fast-track parliament’s dissolution but the opposition led by ex-premier Benjamin Netanyahu may attempt to derail the process, in a bid to form a replacement cabinet without the need for what would be the regime’s fifth election in less than four years.
Marking the first step in a series of votes before the formal disbanding of the government, the parliament voted unanimously in a preliminary reading of a bill to dissolve itself, which is expected to be finalized next week.
After the dissolution foreign minister Yair Lapid will take over from Bennett on an interim basis under an existing agreement.
It came two days after Bennett announced his plan to disband the cabinet during a televised news conference.
Monday’s announcement comes after weeks of speculation that the coalition - the most diverse in the occupying regime’s history - was on the brink of collapse.
The regime is now set to hold a fifth general election in under four years.
An election could take place in late October, commentators say.
The regime held four inconclusive elections between 2019 and 2021, which were largely referendums about Netanyahu’s ability to rule while on trial for corruption.
The Gaza Strip-based Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas welcomed the dissolution of the regime’s embattled cabinet.
Hamas’ spokesman Fawzi Barhum made the remarks on Tuesday after recurrent defections from Bennett’s ruling coalition forced him to submit the bill to dissolve the parliament.
“Disintegration of the Zionist regime’s cabinet is a testament to the regime and its internal structure’s brittle and weak quality,” Barhum said.
Barhum said “the fall of the Israeli cabinet” was a sign of “our nation’s steadfastness and the resistance’s power to send the cabinet into disarray, break its will, and prevent the realization of its goals.”
Notwithstanding the predictions, Barhum said, whatever the composition of the regime’s next coalition will be, it would not change Hamas’ principled stance of choosing to put up resistance against it towards “complete restoration” of the Palestinian nation’s rights.