(All Israel News)—Finance Minister and Religious Zionism chairman Bezalel Smotrich voted against the proposal of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have the IDF take control of the entire Gaza Stip, and later criticized Netanyahu, saying he has “lost faith” that the prime minister “can and wants to lead the IDF” to do so.
Smotrich strongly attacked Netanyahu’s proposal in a video statement uploaded to 𝕏, saying it misleads both the Israeli public and the reservists, because it its goal is not a complete and final victory over Hamas, rather it is only intended to increase pressure on Hamas to reach a hostage-ceasefire deal.
לצערי בישיבת הקבינט האחרונה איבדתי את האמון שראש הממשלה יכול ורוצה להוביל את צה”ל להכרעה וניצחון. pic.twitter.com/tyvHKThf5o
— בצלאל סמוטריץ’ (@bezalelsm) August 9, 2025
“I have lost faith that the prime minister can and wants to lead the IDF there,” Smotrich said following the Cabinet decision.
Despite the prime minister ordering the IDF to seize control of the entire Gaza Strip, Smotrich said he does not believe Netanyahu intends to completely take control of Gaza.
“That’s not how you subdue, that’s not how to return hostages, that’s not how a war is won,” Smotrich said. “To send tens of thousands of fighters to maneuver in the city of Gaza while risking their lives, paying heavy political and international prices, just to put pressure on Hamas to release hostages, and then withdraw back – it is immoral and illogical folly.”
“Unfortunately, for the first time since the beginning of the war, I feel I just can’t stand behind this decision and back it up. My conscience does not allow this,” he continued.
IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir also opposed Netanyahu’s plan, presenting his own proposal to the Security Cabinet, according to reports in Hebrew media. Zamir warned that the proposed plan would endanger the hostages while increasing the strain on the IDF.
On Thursday night, the Cabinet voted to adopt Netanyahu’s proposal. Maariv quoted the prime minister telling Zamir after the vote: “The plan you presented will not help the return of the hostages. The plan we have now approved will more effectively achieve the goals of the war.”
Zamir had reportedly noted that the evacuation of around one million Palestinians near Gaza City, in the central part of the enclave, is a complex process that could not be completed in the proposal’s timeframe.
Smotrich also blasted Netanyahu for appearing to support a plan that would guarantee victory over Hamas, only to make “a U-turn.”
“In recent weeks, I have worked intensively with the prime minister on a dramatic move to win in Gaza,” Smotrich said. “A combination of a quick military decision and an immediate political move that will exact a painful price from Hamas, destroy its military and civilian capabilities, exert unprecedented pressure on it to release the hostages and raise the spirit of the people of Israel. For weeks, it seemed that the prime minister supported the plan, he discussed its details with me and broadcast that he was going to a decision and that this time he intended to go all the way, but unfortunately he made a U-turn.”
Smotrich said that Netanyahu and the cabinet “gave in to weakness.”
“The prime minister and the Cabinet gave in to weaknesses, let emotion prevail over their senses, and decided to do more of the same again, and to embark on a military move whose purpose is not decisiveness, but only to exert pressure on Hamas in order to bring it to a partial hostage deal,” he stated.
On Sunday morning, Smotrich allegedly expressed a willingness to go to elections.
“As far as I’m concerned, it is possible to stop everything and let the people decide,” Smotrich was quoted as saying by public broadcaster Kan News.
Smotrich’s opinion appeared to be shared by others in his party. Religious Zionism party Knesset Member Zvi Sukkot said this morning on Army Radio: “In the current state of affairs, I think we should go to elections.”
Members of the Jewish Power party also expressed a willingness to go to elections. Knesset Member Yitzhak Kreuzer told 103FM Radio that the party will consider going to elections if the proposal does not lead to “the complete defeat of the terror organizations in the Gaza Strip.”
“There may come a point where we will have to return the mandate to the citizens of the State of Israel, when this government is certainly acting against the opinion of its own voters,” Kreuzer said. “When the prime minister leads the Knesset to provide aid and again maneuvers to reach a partial deal, we are certainly very opposed to that.”
In his remarks, Smotrich urged Netanyahu to change his mind.
“It’s not too late to reconsider,” Smotrich said, addressing Netanyahu. “Convene the cabinet again, and announce in no uncertain terms that there will be no more halfway measures. That there will be no more partial deals. That this time, we are moving towards a clear and decisive course of action leading to victory, culminating in the complete surrender of Hamas and the return of all hostages in a single operation, or its complete defeat and destruction. Annexation of large parts of the Gaza Strip and opening its gates to voluntary migration.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
