The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has fired his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, a figure widely considered by Israel’s international allies to be a brake on the far-right elements of the country’s coalition government, prompting protests around Israel.

Netanyahu said in a video statement late on Tuesday that “significant gaps on handling the battle” in Gaza had emerged.

“At the height of a war, complete trust is needed between the prime minister and the defence minister … In recent months, that trust between me and the defence minister was damaged,” he said. The move prompted protests across the country.

Israel Katz, a fellow Likud party member currently serving as foreign minister, will replace Gallant. The leader of the centre-right New Hope, Gideon Saar, who rejoined Netanyahu’s coalition in September, will serve as foreign minister.

Katz posted on X: “We will work together to march the security system to victory against our enemies and to achieve the goals of the war: the return of all the abductees as the most important value mission, the destruction of Hamas in Gaza, the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the containment of Iranian aggression and the return of the residents of the north and south to their homes in safety.”

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Within hours, thousands of protesters gathered in central Tel Aviv, pounding drums and blocking the city’s main highway. About 1,000 people demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem, while protests and roadblocks also sprang up in other spots across the country, with some demonstrators reportedly clashing with police.

In Tel Aviv, the demonstrators held up signs with slogans such as “We deserve better leaders” and “Leaving no one behind!”. One protester wore handcuffs and a face mask with Netanyahu’s likeness, while others wore “Bring them home now!” T-shirts in reference to Gaza-held hostages.

“We, the protesters, believe that Gallant … is actually the only normal person in the government,” said teacher Samuel Miller, 54, condemning Netanyahu’s government for opening “new fronts in uncalled-for wars”.

Netanyahu had been at odds with Gallant since his latest coalition entered office at the end of 2022, when the defence minister became the only senior government figure opposed to planned judicial reforms that critics said amounted to democratic backsliding.

His dismissal was long expected. Over 13 months of war in Gaza, and one in Lebanon, disagreements over strategy and how best to bring Israeli hostages home frequently put the two men at loggerheads. The final straw appears to have been Gallant’s renewed efforts this week to enforce military conscription for the Ultra-Orthodox community. The two Ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset, Netanyahu’s longstanding allies, are obdurately opposed to the new policy.

In a statement late on Tuesday, Gallant said his dismissal was triggered by disputes over Ultra-Orthodox conscription, Israel’s “moral obligation to return the hostages” and the need for a full inquiry to learn lessons of the 7 October terror attacks.

Gallant had also publicly dismissed Netanyahu’s oft-repeated goal of “total victory” over Hamas, saying that Israel’s military success had created the conditions for a diplomatic deal. “The security of the state of Israel was and will always remain the mission of my life,” he wrote on X on Tuesday night, minutes after Netanyahu’s announcement.

The Hostage Families Forum released a statement in which it expressed deep concern over how the sudden change could affect the fate of the 101 hostages still in Gaza.

“We expect the incoming defence minister to prioritise a hostage deal and work closely with mediators and the international community to secure the immediate release of all hostages,” it said.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said on X that the move was an “act of madness” in the middle of a war. “Netanyahu is selling Israel’s security and the Israeli army soldiers for a disgraceful political survival,” he said.

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, whose largely ceremonial office is meant to help unify the country, called the dismissal “the last thing Israel needs”.

The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, praised Netanyahu for firing Gallant. “With Gallant … absolute victory cannot be achieved – and the prime minister did well to remove him from his position,” Ben-Gvir said on Telegram.

Yair Golan, the head of the Democrats, a newly formed leftwing party, used social media to urge Israelis to take to the streets in protest against Gallant’s firing. Thousands of Israelis took part in spontaneous demonstrations and strikes in March to oppose Netanyahu’s first attempt to fire his defence minister over the judicial overhaul. The unexpected backlash forced the prime minister to reverse his decision and postpone the overhaul until the next Knesset session.

Polls show that Gallant has consistently been the most popular member of Netanyahu’s cabinet. A senior general in the military before entering politics, he was widely viewed at home and abroad as a moderate influence over Netanyahu’s decision making. The prosecutor’s office of the international criminal court is seeking an arrest warrant for both men over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

Benny Gantz, a major Netanyahu rival, former defence minister and leader of the centre-right National Unity party, joined the prime minister’s three-man war cabinet alongside Gallant after the 7 October Hamas attack, but he resigned in June, saying Netanyahu was “preventing us from progressing towards a true victory”.

Gantz described the move as “politics at the expense of national security”.

It is possible that the prime minister could shutter the war cabinet and revert to a former model in which security issues are discussed in a limited forum before being presented at regular cabinet meetings.

A White House spokesperson praised Gallant as an “important partner” and said the US would “continue to work collaboratively with Israel’s next minister of defence”.

However, a senior US official said it had “real questions about the reasons for Gallant’s firing and about what is driving the decision”, the Israeli paper Haaretz reported. It quoted the official as saying Netanyahu’s decision was “surprising” and “concerning, especially in the middle of two wars and as Israel prepares to defend against a potential attack from Iran”.

In Gaza, the World Health Organization said it hoped the biggest medical evacuation from the territory since the war broke out would get under way on Wednesday, with 113 seriously ill and injured patients expected to leave via Israel for treatment in the United Arab Emirates and Romania.

About 14,000 people are in urgent need of medical care outside Gaza, according to WHO data. Around half are suffering from severe injuries caused by the fighting and half from serious conditions such as cancer.

Israel granted permission for about 5,000 people to leave Gaza for medical reasons earlier in the war, but only 282 have been able to do so since Israeli forces seized control of Rafah on the Egyptian border in May. Rafah had served as Gaza’s main lifeline to the outside world since Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on the territory after Hamas took control of it in 2007.

It was not immediately clear whether any of the medical evacuees would be transferred from the northern third of Gaza, which Israel cut off from the rest of the strip at the beginning of the year. Israeli forces have waged a renewed ground and aerial offensive on the area since early October, which it says is necessary to mop up Hamas cells that have regrouped.

Sweeping evacuation orders for the 400,000 people whom the UN estimates still live there, the blockade of aid and food deliveries and the targeting of civilian infrastructure including the three remaining and struggling hospitals have led rights groups to accuse Israel of the war crime of seeking to forcibly displace the remaining population.

Israel has denied it is systematically removing Palestinians from the area or using food as a weapon, both of which are illegal under international law.

At least 30 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes across Gaza on Tuesday, including eight women and six children in the northern town of Beit Lahiya. The Israeli military said it had targeted a weapons storage facility.

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report

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