"I am compelled to warn about what is happening there and is being concealed from us," Yaalon told Israel's public broadcaster Kan on Sunday. "At the end of the day, war crimes are being committed." Yaalon is a former army chief of staff who served as defence minister under Netanyahu from 2013-16, and has been a fierce critic of the prime minister ever since. Netanyahu's Likud party accused him of spreading "slanderous lies", while Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, head of a small rightist party, said his accusations were baseless. "Everything Israel does is in accordance with international law and it is a pity that former minister Ya'alon does not realise the damage that he has done and retract his remarks," he told a conference hosted by Israel Today newspaper. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last month issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence chief Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.

we must demand an immediate end to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, which is causing an enormous number of civilian casualties and is in violation of international law. Israel is at war with Hamas, not innocent Palestinian men, women and children. Israel cannot bomb an entire neighborhood to take out one Hamas target. We don’t know if this campaign has been effective in degrading Hamas’s military capabilities. But we do know that a reported 70 percent of the casualties are women and children, and that 104 U.N. aid workers and 53 journalists have been killed. That’s not acceptable.

Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party was explicitly formed on the premise that “between the Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” and the current coalition agreement reinforces that goal. This is not just ideology. The Israeli government has systematically pursued this goal. The last year saw record Israeli settlement growth in the West Bank, where more than 700,000 Israelis now live in areas that the United Nations and the United States agree are occupied territories. They have used state violence to back up this de facto annexation. Since Oct. 7, the United Nations reports that at least 208 Palestinians, including 53 children, have been killed by Israeli security forces and settlers. This cannot be allowed to continue.

The blank check approach must end. The United States must make clear that while we are friends of Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of decency. That includes an end to indiscriminate bombing; a significant pause to bombing so that massive humanitarian assistance can come into the region; the right of displaced Gazans to return to their homes; no long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza; an end to settler violence in the West Bank and a freeze on settlement expansion; and a commitment to broad peace talks for a two-state solution in the wake of the war.