A week before the extended deadline to form a governing coalition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still struggling to establish a government.
Netanyahu earlier this week blasted his potential coalition partners for making "exorbitant demands," with senior Likud officials saying on Monday the lack of progress might lead to another election.
Last week, Netanyahu said he might be looking at a minority government to break the deadlock.
Hebrew media has been awash with contradictory rumors about the two big sticking points in the coalition negotiations: the immunity law, which would grant the prime minister immunity from criminal prosecution, which would be crucial to Netanyahu's survival if indicted; and the haredi conscription bill, which is pitting the secular and ultra-Orthodox parties against each other.
Leader of the haredi United Torah Judaism party, Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman, who is in the spotlight for allegedly protecting sexual offenders from prosecution, said at a conference on Tuesday that negotiations were still underway.
"We haven't yet reached an agreement on the big issues – the draft law, Shabbat, education," Arutz 7 reported him saying. "I'm not talking about money, I'm talking about the basics, we're still in the middle of the negotiations."
A meeting between Likud and UTJ, originally scheduled for Wednesday, was postponed and then canceled due to the Lag Ba'omer holiday, which begins Wednesday evening.
Meanwhile, sources inside former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman's nationalist, secular Yisrael Beytenu party, reported progress in coalition talks.
Meanwhile, the religious Zionist parties expressed regret that Netanyahu appeared to be pulling back from previous agreements and his commitment to the settlement enterprise. Sources from the factions that make up the United Right list (Habayit Hayehudi, National Union, and Otzma Yehudit), told the Kipa news outlet that they had had no contact with the Likud for a week.
This article was originally published by i24NEWS. Read more at https://www.i24news.tv/en.
