The pressure the IDF will exert will be “more and more powerful,” and will include “seizing territory” and “doing other things” in Gaza if Hamas does not return Israeli hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the Knesset plenum on Wednesday. The prime minister did not elaborate further.
Netanyahu’s comments came during a debate known as the “40 Signatures Debate,” which is the Israeli version of the British “Prime Minister’s Questions”. The debate included a series of short speeches in the prime minister’s presence, after which the prime minister and opposition leader gave concluding speeches.
In his speech, Netanyahu repeated conspiracy theories about a “deep state.”
“Democracy is not in danger; the bureaucracy is in danger, the deep state is in danger,” the prime minister said. “When I say ‘bureaucracy,’ I mean a small group of officials struggling to maintain the levers of power in the country.”
“Democracy is, first and foremost, the rule of the people. It is not the rule of officials, not the rule of former leaders, and not the rule of media outlets. In a democracy, the people are sovereign, and they demand that their vote in the ballot box be reflected in policy. This does not mean the government has unlimited power. We do not have a tyrannical rule, but it is impossible to expect the government to have negligible power,” Netanyahu said.
Opposition leader MK Yair Lapid dedicated his speech to attacking the 2025 national budget, which passed into law on Tuesday. Lapid said to Netanyahu, “You carried out yesterday the greatest theft in the history of the country. You exploit the Israeli middle class, squeeze it, all for one purpose: to survive politically.”
High levels of crime in the Arab sector
The official topic of Wednesday’s debate was the high levels of crime in the Arab sector, and opposition MKs blasted the prime minister for the high crime levels.
Hadash-Ta’al chairman MK Ayman Odeh opened the discussion by presenting a series of statistics. Odeh, quoting the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, said that since Netanyahu took office, there were 14 times more homicides in the Arab sector than the Jewish state.
Until 2008, the ratio was 3:1. Just 14.8% of homicides in the Arab sector have been solved, compared to approximately 70% in the Jewish sector, and even those were “usually when the perpetrator turned himself in,” Odeh said.
Odeh noted that the annual number of homicides had risen by 230% in five years, and 58 people have been killed since the beginning of 2025. Arab citizens were 18% of the population but suffered 80% of violent crime.
According to Odeh, this was not a matter of fate but a matter of policy, and the fact that the prime minister appointed Otzma Yehudit chairman MK Itamar Ben-Gvir, who Odeh called a “racist and fascist”, to the position of National Security Minister proved this.
Odeh added that the fact that homicide rates were lower in the Palestinian Authority and Jordan showed that the problem was not a “cultural problem” but a result of failed policy.
Ra’am chairman MK Mansour Abbas said that a worker in the National Security Minister had told him that Ben-Gvir chuckled when homicide numbers in the Arab sector were brought to him. Abbas did not provide proof of this claim.
During the debate, families of hostages and victims of the October 7 held up signs saying, “If we have returned to October 6, return my child.”
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