2025

Ex-Defense Minister Gallant Resigns, Criticizes Judicial Overhaul and Ultra-Orthodox Exemptions

Former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced his resignation from the Knesset on Wednesday, citing policy disagreements within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Gallant will remain a member of the party but said he could not support recent government moves on judicial reform and military enlistment.

In a televised statement, Gallant reflected on his decades of military and political service, taking credit for weakening the military capabilities of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. He also assumed responsibility for Israel’s preparedness ahead of the devastating October 7 Hamas assault, as well as for the ongoing war. “As on the battlefield, so too in public service, there are moments when you have to stop to assess the situation and choose the course of action,” Gallant said. He added that his “journey is not yet complete.”

Gallant sharply criticized the government’s judicial overhaul, calling it a “clear and immediate danger.” He also argued for universal military enlistment, emphasizing that the inclusion of ultra-Orthodox Israelis is a “military necessity.” He accused Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz of advancing plans to exempt ultra-Orthodox citizens from service, a policy he said he could not support.

The announcement comes after months of tension between Gallant and Netanyahu, including Gallant’s absence on Tuesday during a critical budget vote, which saw Netanyahu leave his hospital bed to participate. In March, Netanyahu fired Gallant after he opposed the judicial overhaul, only to reinstate him amid public protests.

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BAYAMÓN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Power was restored to nearly all electrical customers across Puerto Rico on Wednesday after a sweeping blackout plunged the U.S. territory into darkness on New Year’s Eve.

By Wednesday afternoon, power was back up for 98% of Puerto Rico’s 1.47 million utility customers, said Luma Energy, the private company overseeing transmission and distribution of power in the archipelago. Lights returned to households as well as to Puerto Rico’s hospitals, water plants and sewage facilities after the massive outage that exposed the persistent electricity problems plaguing the island.

Still, the company warned that customers could still see temporary outages in the coming days. It said full restoration across the island could take up to two days.

“Given the fragile nature of the grid, we will need to manage available generation to customer demand, which will likely require rotating temporary outages,” Juan Saca, president of Luma Energy, said in a statement.

The lights went off in Puerto Rico at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, darkening almost the entire archipelago as people prepared to ring in the New Year. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the outage, but Luma Energy said a preliminary review pointed to a failure in an underground electric line in the south of the territory.

Governor-elect Jenniffer González Colón, who is set to take office on Thursday, warned that customers might experience interruptions in the coming days, with power plants not yet operating at maximum capacity.

“These days, I urge you to be moderate with your energy consumption to help reduce load shifting, so that more people can have access to electricity and the system can start up without any major setbacks,” González Colón said on social media platform X.

On the campaign trail, González Colón had promised to appoint an “energy czar” to oversee the operation of the power grid, which has long been fragile and faulty due to years of neglect.

The island’s power grid was ravaged in September 2017 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm.

Unreliable electricity remains frustratingly common, hindering daily life for Puerto Ricans. In June, over 340,000 customers were left without electricity as people reeled from soaring temperatures. At the peak of Hurricane Ernesto, in August, over half of all utility customers lost power. Tens of thousands of people remained without electricity a week after the storm.

The New Year’s Eve outage came as clients brace for a hike in electricity rates. Last month, Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau approved an increase of 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour for residential customers from January through March, causing electric bills for the average household to jump by nearly $20, the Energy Bureau says.

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CAIRO (Reuters) -The Palestinian Authority temporarily halted operations of Qatar’s Al Jazeera television in the territory including its broadcasts, citing the network’s dissemination of “inciting material,” the Palestinian news agency WAFA said on Wednesday.

The culture, interior and communications ministers made the decision jointly because the channel broadcast material that was “deceiving and stirring strife,” WAFA said without providing details on the subject matter.

The order said the decision was temporary but did not specify an end date.

The Palestinian Authority criticised Al Jazeera last week over its coverage of the weeks-long standoff between Palestinian security forces and militant fighters in the Jenin camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Al Jazeera denounced Wednesday’s decision as “an attempt to discourage it from reporting spiraling events in the occupied territories,” according to a statement.

It called on the Palestinian Authority to rescind the decision and allow its journalists to report freely from the West Bank without intimidation.

The decision was not expected to be implemented in Hamas-run Gaza where the Palestinian Authority does not exercise power.

Fatah, the faction that controls the Palestinian Authority, said the broadcaster was sowing division in “our Arab homeland in general and in Palestine in particular”. It encouraged Palestinians not to cooperate with the network.

The Israeli military in September raided Al Jazeera’s bureau in the West Bank city of Ramallah and ordered it shut.

Israel in May issued an order barring the channel from operating and broadcasting in the country, saying it posed a threat to Israeli security. A court subsequently upheld the ban.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Ali Sawafta; Writing by Menna Alaa; Editing by Alistair Bell and Cynthia Osterman)

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