The two opposition leaders expressed their willingness, but Lapid demanded far-right leaders and ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, be removed. Gantz agreed to join alongside the two, the report said.
Netanyahu, who has won the backing of 64 Members of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), has been assigned the task to form the next government, a statement from the Presidency said.
There is only one perpetrator, Hamas. It is a terrorist organisation. It is obscene to argue that until the Palestinian question is solved, anybody has the right to use terrorism as an instrument of policy, argues Shekhar Gupta.
At least nine Israelis were stabbed by a 23-year-old Arab man on a bus in Tel Aviv, the latest in a series of 'lone-wolf' terror attacks in which Palestinians have used knives, meat cleavers and vehicles as weapons.
'The Modi regime, after experimenting with its own versions of neighbourhood policy for 18 months, has now reached the exact stage where the Manmohan Singh government had left it in so far as our Pakistan policy is concerned,' says former senior RA&W officer Vappala Balachandran.
'No one knows whether exposure to the Nobel process would be to her liking, or would benefit her symbolic position above the fray,' says Sunanda K Datta-Ray.
'Modi, with his sharply honed political savvy and undoubted grasp of international affairs, is a past master at taking the measure of world leaders.' 'He would be the last person to think of the unpredictable and not too well-regarded Trump as the mediator,' says B S Raghavan.
