Likud lawmaker, veteran sets up tent outside Knesset in call for unity

Likud Knesset member Elisha Medan, who was wounded while fighting in Gaza in 2023, set up a tent on Saturday night outside the Knesset in Jerusalem to call for establishing a national unity government.

“I intend to sit in the tent day and night, in the cold and the rain, to give voice to large sections of the people who keep reaching out to me with their longing for unity,” he wrote in Hebrew on X before arriving to Jerusalem.

Medan said that his running for the Israeli parliament was to “help this nation remain one people.” Working shoulder to shoulder in recent years on the battlefield, on the home front, in volunteering and at home showed “what we can when we’re together,” the lawmaker continued.

“It’s time the house of elected representatives looked that way too,” he added.

Four of Medan’s fellow soldiers were killed in the blast that cost him both legs. He now walks with prosthetics.

He could be seen later sitting on a wheelchair with a placard that reads, “Unity!”

Lawmakers of the Religious Zionist party, Itamar Eitam and Orit Strook, visited Medan at his tent on Saturday night.

Eitam posted a video on X in which he stated he was about to leave his home in northern Israel to drive to the capital and join Medan’s call for a unity government.

“We will sit in the tent together until a unity government is formed,” he pledged. He called on additional legislators to join them, saying “Brothers, the time for unity has come.”

Strook, who also serves as Israel’s Settlements and National Missions Minister, recounted her visit three years to the hospital where Medan was being treated. “I told his mother, Ruthie: ‘He’s a strong young man. He’ll be okay,” she related on X.

“And he is strong. And he is okay, and he is calling all of us to order,” she continued, adding that she is going to echo his message as well. “Because we didn’t get through these three years for our enemies to divide us,” Strook added, referring to Israel’s ongoing war against Iran and its proxies across the Middle East.

‘Establish unity!’

In an interview with Channel 12‘s “Meet the Press” program, aired on Saturday evening, Medan spoke of his swearing-in ceremony experience at the Knesset last week, in which he was welcomed with a standing ovation.

The reception “surprised me, I didn’t think this would happen, but it made me happy. It gives me hope that we can stand together,” the new MK told the panelists.

He further said that he is putting up a tent to reflect the “people’s voice. The people are crying: establish unity!”

Ahead of the Nov. 10 swearing-in ceremony, Medan wrote on X in Hebrew, “Today, on the day of the Knesset’s swearing-in, I decided that when I pledge allegiance to the Knesset and the people of Israel, I will stand on my own two feet.”

He continued, “I will do so despite the pain, the bleeding that won’t stop and my medical condition, which is still unclear.”

He then called for the formation of a broad national unity government.

Netanyahu calls Eisenkot for coalition talks ‘without preconditions’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday night called on his political rival Gadi Eisenkot to establish a national unity government that will deal with the Iranian threat together.

He urged the former military chief to accept coalition negotiations “without preconditions” and accept agreements “for the sake of Israel’s security and future.”

The Iranian regime that murdered thousands of its own people “will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against us,” Netanyahu warned in a recorded message delivered to the press. “We must remove this existential threat hanging over our heads once and for all,” he continued.

He said that a narrow government reliant on the 19 Knesset seats of the Arab parties, or on some of their lawmakers, whom he branded “supporters of terrorism,” will not be able to accomplish this task.

But a national unity government, Netanyahu stressed, “can achieve it in time, thereby ensuring Israel’s security for many years to come.”

Shortly afterward, Eisenkot released a Hebrew-language statement labeling Netanyahu’s plea for a unity government “another political spin.”

The chairman of Yashar party said that there is no need to call for a negotiation meeting since one had already been scheduled for Sunday.

He said that Netanyahu was fully aware of his conditions for joining a national emergency government under his leadership, which include “a break with the extremists,” apparently referring to the factions of ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the heads of the Religious Zionist and Otzma Yehudit parties, respectively.