Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won a clear majority of support to form the next coalition government on Monday. Yet, there has been an overt international criticism to PM Netanyahu's fourth term presidency due to his reluctant commitment to a two-state solution and his stance toward Israeli Arabs in the country.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin is wrapping up two days of talks with representatives of the 10 parties elected to parliament to hear who they would recommend as prime minister, with six throwing their support behind Netanyahu. PM Netanyahu is now tasked with forming the next government.
Netanyahu appears poised to set up a coalition with the new centrist party Kulanu and several religious and ultra-Orthodox parties, the right-wing Jewish Home party, and the ultraorthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, giving him the 61-seat majority out of 120 in parliament needed to give him a fourth tenure as prime minister.
Throughout the election campaign, Kahlon had held his cards close to his chest, hedging his bets as most polls predicted a win for the Zionist Union. But after Netanyahu's decisive victory, Kahlon threw his support behind Netanyahu, in a move formalised in talks with Rivlin on Monday.
PM Netanyahu has promised Kahlon the powerful finance portfolio.
Four parties are entering the opposition; the Zionist Union, the Joint List which groups Israel's main Arab parties, the centrist Yesh Atid and the leftwing Meretz party.
Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party won 30 of the 120 seats in parliament against 24 for the center-left Zionist Union in the parliamentary election on 17 March.
Meanwhile, ahead of the United Nations rights council session on Gaza war, Arab countries condemned Israel's negative approach towards Arabs stating that Israel's human rights violations during the Gaza war of 2014 were so grave that they may amount to crimes against humanity, Arab countries said Monday at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
A UN commission is currently compiling its first report on the fighting between Palestinian armed groups and Israeli forces that left 2,230 Palestinians and more than 70 Israelis dead in July and August.
"We cannot overlook these harrowing statistics as simple collateral damage," Bahrain's Geneva envoy, Yusuf Abdulkarim Bucheeri, said on behalf of the group of Arab countries.
Even though the commission's report has been delayed from March to June, it is already clear that Israel's military operation violated international law "and may be tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity," he said. Crimes against humanity are defined as widespread or systematic attacks against civilian populations.
