Zionist entity’s Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu is formally given the Israeli president’s mandate to form the occupation regime’s 37th government, less than two weeks after Netanyahu’s right-religious political bloc won a decisive 64-lawmaker majority at the polls that will enable it to retake power after 19 months in the opposition.
“I decided to bestow upon you, MK Benjamin Netanyahu, the mandate to form a government,” said President Isaac Herzog to Netanyahu, at the president’s residence in occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem).
It “hasn’t escaped my notice” that Netanyahu is on trial for corruption, Herzog was quoted as saying by Israeli media.
“I am not oblivious, of course, to the fact that there are ongoing legal proceedings against MK Netanyahu at the Jerusalem District Court, and I do not trivialize this at all,” added Herzog.
“In light of all this, having considered the facts in accordance with the law, and after you gave your consent to this, as required by law, I have decided to assign to you, MK Benjamin Netanyahu, the task of forming a government,” Herzog continued as quoted by The Times of Israel.
Sunday is the eighth time that Netanyahu, the Zionist entity’s longest-serving prime minister, has received the required mandate from an Israeli president in order to attempt to form a government. He has succeeded five times and failed three, and served as prime minister an additional sixth time when he was elevated to the post by a short-lived direct election law in 1996.
Netanyahu will have 28 days to form a government. The Israeli president also has the discretion to give Netanyahu a 14-day extension should he request it.
Upon receiving the mandate, Netanyahu said that he will be a prime minister for “all of Israel’s citizens, without exception.”
He said there has been a wide agreement on the “need to fight terror; to prevent Iran from attaining the nuclear weapons with which it intends to directly threaten Israel’s existence; to maintain the so-called unity of Al-Quds and to achieve more peace agreements — peace out of strength, peace in return for peace, with additional Arab states, and thus largely to end the Israeli-Arab conflict. I didn’t say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Source: Israeli media
