When pagers exploded across Lebanon last week, the year-long war with Hezbollah was not at the top of the Israeli political agenda.

Instead, the political class was convulsed with speculation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and replace him with a military neophyte, Gideon Sa’ar, to shore up his domestic power. National security heavyweights were scathing. “It’ll take him months on end to train for the job,” said Gadi Eisenkot, a highly respected former Israeli military chief and member of the opposition.

The pager and subsequent walkie-talkie explosions – which together killed dozens, maimed thousands, and rattled Lebanese nerves – put paid to that scheme, for now. The suddenly heightened tensions with Hezbollah gave Gallant a lifeline. Reports in the Israeli press suggest that the stay on Gallant’s dismissal is only temporary, and that Netanyahu still intends to fire him.

Policy and domestic politics are impossible to separate in any democracy, but especially in Netanyahu’s Israel – and especially now.

Political imperatives

The Israeli government says it needed to ramp up the war with Hezbollah to return 60,000 displaced civilians to their homes in northern Israel. Since the day after the October 7 attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah has been firing on Israel in solidarity with the militant group and Palestinians in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands have also been forced from their homes by Israeli bombardment in Lebanon.

Returning the northern residents home is a political imperative in Israel. And since the cabinet formally added the goal to its war aims, it’s a policy one too. But the heightened war with Hezbollah also stands in the way of Netanyahu’s desire to fire Gallant.

Just this week, after giving the green light to a US-backed mediation effort with Lebanon, the prime minister faced withering criticism from his right-wing allies, who say only a military conflict will remove Hezbollah from the border. Ben Gvir’s party held an urgent consultation – implicitly threatening to upend the coalition. The criticism forced Netanyahu to release a statement rejecting the idea of an imminent ceasefire. When he later put out another statement saying that he was engaging in the process with the United States, he only released it in English, not Hebrew.

In attacking Hezbollah, the Israeli government is trying to “decouple” Lebanon from Gaza. Hezbollah says that it’s attacking Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza; Israel wants to get Hezbollah to stop firing even without a Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal. And yet there is a widespread assumption among the national security class in Israel that Netanyahu is prolonging the war in Gaza because he knows that as soon as it is over, he will face enormous pressure to call an election.

The families of the 101 people still held hostage in Gaza regularly accuse the prime minister of playing for time and putting his political survival above the national interest.

“If Netanyahu wanted to end it, he could. So I guess that’s not his intention at this point.”

Long-running tensions

The prime minister and Gallant have long had strained relations, despite a period of unity following Hamas’ October 7 attack.

The two have often disagreed over the war in Gaza. In August, Gallant told a closed-door Knesset committee that Netanyahu’s goal of “absolute victory” in Gaza was “nonsense,” according to Israeli media. Netanyahu took the extraordinary step of releasing a press statement accusing Gallant of adopting an “anti-Israel narrative.”

Gallant was also highly critical of Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israeli control of a strip of territory along the Gaza-Egypt border, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, calling it a “moral disgrace.” In cabinet, he voted against continued occupation there, seeing it as a hinderance to a ceasefire and hostage deal. “If we want the hostages alive, we don’t have time,” he said.

With both the Philadelphi Corridor and Hezbollah, Netanyahu’s critics have questioned why, if they were so critical, he waited months to raise the stakes over those issues. Netanyahu has said in response that it was a “progression of military advancement.”

Indeed, when the prime minister previously attempted to dismiss Gallant, in March last year, it was over the defense minister’s opposition to Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul – an issue that had the potential to bring down the government.

The idea that Gallant might be fired over the judicial reforms led immediately to mass protests that came to be known in Israel as the “Night of Gallant.” Ultimately, Netanyahu did not follow through. One of the factors weighing on Netanyahu in his hesitance to fire him now has been fear of a second such night.

The exemption question

Behind the headlines of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, Netanyahu’s ability to govern has long been threatened by a seemingly back-burner issue: the Israeli military’s recruitment of ultra-Orthodox Israelis, known in Hebrew as Haredim.

“The danger to the coalition connected to the draft law for the Haredim is very high,” Malach said. “So (Netanyahu) would do the things that will help him keep the coalition. And if Gallant is in his way to keep the coalition, he will do whatever he can to remove him from the office.”

The issue of ultra-Orthodox military service has long plagued Israel. Ultra-Orthodox Jews had since Israel’s founding been exempt from mandatory service, because they viewed Torah study as the highest calling. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court said that the exemption violated equal protection principles and mandated the IDF to start drafting.

Ever since, the ultra-Orthodox parties on whom Netanyahu relies to govern have been trying to draft legislation to enshrine a new exemption in law. Up until now, they have been notably unwilling to follow through on threats to leave the coalition – rarely have they had so much power. But their unhappiness with the IDF’s current mandate to recruit ultra-Orthodox men remains a sword of Damocles.

Gallant is a thorn in Netanyahu’s side, pushing him not to give in to the ultra-Orthodox desire for an exemption. He, like many military leaders, thinks that all Jewish Israelis should share the burden of military service – and has said he won’t support any law that doesn’t have broad political support.

Sa’ar, whom Netanyahu wanted to replace Gallant, was said to have much better relations with the ultra-Orthodox parties.

Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of the General Staff, said the ultra-Orthodox issue was central to Netanyahu’s desire to get rid of the defense minister.

“Firing Gallant – and I’m not a fan of Gallant – is meant to serve political needs, to pass the conscription law, consequently damaging the IDF,” he said. “This is more of Netanyahu’s cynical policy.”

With Netanyahu’s backing, the ultra-Orthodox parties hope to pass a military exemption when the Knesset returns following the Jewish High Holidays in October. Even if the law passes, the Supreme Court is almost certain to knock it down, Malach said.

“But the point is that you are getting time. And this is the most important thing for Netanyahu,” he said. “The short term is the whole term for him. Because until the Supreme Court will decide, he will get one year, two years – that’s enough.”

That short-term strategy may well come to apply to Hezbollah as well. Amid all the talk of whether Israel will invade Lebanon in the coming days, there is no discussion of what a long-term settlement with Israel’s neighbor might look like.

Michael Shemesh, a correspondent for Israeli broadcaster Kan traveling with Netanyahu to New York this week, said that reporters asked an aide to the prime minister about the potential that Gallant might be fired.

“We don’t do politics during wartime,” the aide replied. “There were reporters who couldn’t help but laugh,” Shemesh said.

Pope Francis has pledged to root out the “scourge” of clerical sexual abuse after Belgium’s prime minster urged him in unusually frank terms to take concrete action.

Francis was addressing political leaders on Friday at the official residence of the King of Belgium, a country where devastating clerical abuse scandals have erupted in recent years.

Before he spoke, both the Belgian king and Prime Minister Alexander de Croo raised the issue in their speeches, the latter speaking directly to the pope, in remarks that underline how the abuse crisis has come to dominate Belgian national attention.

“You are committed to a fair and equitable approach. But the road is still long,” the prime minister told Francis. “If something goes wrong, we can’t accept cover-ups. It harms the precious work done by everyone. And that’s why words are not enough today. Concrete steps are needed. The victims must be heard. They must occupy a central place. They have the right to the truth.”

He added: “In order to look forward, the Church must clarify its past.”

In his remarks, Francis compared the church’s abuse crisis to the biblical story of King Herod’s order that all male children aged two and older be executed.

“This is the shame, the shame that we must all take in hand today and ask for forgiveness and solve the problem, the shame of abuse, of child abuse,” the pope said. “We think of the time of the ‘Holy Innocents’ and say ‘what a tragedy. What did King Herod do?’ But today, in the Church itself there is this crime.”

He said that “the Church must be ashamed and ask for forgiveness and try to resolve this situation with Christian humility and put all the possibilities in places so that this doesn’t happen again.”

The 87-year-old pontiff, who is on a three-day visit to Belgium after spending a day in Luxembourg, insisted that abuse is a “scourge that the church is firmly and decisively by listening to and accompanying those who have been wounded, and by implementing a prevention program throughout the world.”

Appalling revelations of clerical sexual abuse have emerged in Belgium over the last 30 years including the case of a former bishop who abused two of his nephews. The scandal has loomed large over the pope’s trip, during which Francis was also expected to meet 15 abuse survivors.

Meanwhile, the Belgian church has also been caught up in a forced adoption scandal with an investigation by a Flemish newspaper indicating that Belgian nuns had been involved in an estimated 30,000 cases where newborns were taken from their mothers between 1945 and 1980. Most of the cases involved young, unmarried women whose parents wanted the pregnancies kept under wraps.

Francis also addressed this scandal in his remarks, saying: “I was saddened to learn about the practice of ‘forced adoptions’ that also took place here in Belgium between the 1950s and the 1970s. In those poignant stories, we see how the bitter fruit of wrongdoing and criminality was mixed in with what was unfortunately the prevailing view in all parts of society at that time.”

The pope said these cases occurred because the “family and other actors in society, including within the church” thought giving up children for adoption was a way to avoid the unfortunate stigma which fell on “unmarried mothers.”

He said the lesson from the adoption scandal is for the church “never [to] conform to the predominant culture” even if that culture superficially aligns with the church’s values. This, he said, can happen in a “manipulative way” and cause “suffering and exclusion.”

A Thai crocodile farmer who goes by the nickname “Crocodile X” said he killed more than 100 critically endangered reptiles to prevent them from escaping after a typhoon damaged their enclosure.

Natthapak Khumkad, 37, who runs a crocodile farm in Lamphun, northern Thailand, said he scrambled to find his Siamese crocodiles a new home when he noticed a wall securing their enclosure was at risk of collapsing. But nowhere was large or secure enough to hold the crocodiles, some of which were up to 4 meters (13 feet) long.

To stop the crocodiles from getting loose into the local community, Natthapak said, he put 125 of them down on September 22.

Typhoon Yagi, Asia’s most powerful storm this year, swept across southern China and Southeast Asia this month, leaving a trail of destruction with its intense rainfall and powerful winds. Downpours inundated Thailand’s north, submerging homes and riverside villages, killing at least nine people.

Storms like Yagi are “getting stronger due to climate change, primarily because warmer ocean waters provide more energy to fuel the storms, leading to increased wind speeds and heavier rainfall,” said Benjamin Horton, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore.

Natural disasters, including typhoons, pose a range of threats to wildlife, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Flooding can leave animals stranded, in danger of drowning, or separated from their owners or families.

Rain and strong winds can also severely damage habitats and animal shelters. In 2022, Hurricane Ian hit Florida and destroyed the Little Bear Sanctuary in Punta Gorda, leaving 200 animals, including cows, horses, donkeys, pigs and birds without shelter.

The risk of natural disasters to animals is only increasing as human-caused climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent and volatile.

Natthapak said his farm has been open for 17 years and has survived every rainy season until this year, when days of heavy rain eroded the walls of the crocodile tank.

“I had to make a decision in less than 24 hours when I saw the erosion progressed rapidly,” Natthapak said, adding that he electrocuted the crocodiles to kill them.

Pornthip Nualanong, the chief of Lamphun’s fishery office, said Natthapak informed her office as the heavy rains began to threaten the farm.

Killing the crocodiles “was a brave and responsible decision to take, since if any of those grown-up crocs were running loose in nearby paddy fields it would pose (a serious risk to) public safety,” she said.

Among the crocodiles killed was one named Ai Harn, the eldest male breeder and leader of the pack, at 4 meters (13 feet) long.

Videos showed a digger removing the bodies of the crocodiles.

Siamese crocodiles are critically endangered, but they are widely sold and bred in Thailand.

Crocodile farming is a lucrative industry there, with roughly 1,100 registered commercial farms generating between 6 billion and 7 billion Thai baht ($215 million) of revenue annually, Pornthip said.

They were once found across much of Southeast Asia, but hunting and large-scale farming have severely diminished the population of Siamese crocodiles in the wild, with some estimates putting it at just a few hundred.

Earlier this year, 60 Siamese crocodile eggs hatched in Cambodia, the largest recorded breeding event for the species this century.

Natthapak said his family’s original business was selling roasted suckling pigs and calves, but once he noticed how much waste was left over, he decided to use it to feed crocodiles. The family purchased five crocodiles, and the number has grown in the nearly two decades since.

The farm supplies crocodile skins to leather factories, sells frozen meat in Thailand and exports dried crocodile meat to Hong Kong.

He still owns 500 baby crocodiles, which are between 30-120 centimeters (1-4 feet) long.