Due to Infighting in Yamina, MK Comes to Votes in Knesset Six Days After Giving Birth; Bennett Blames Netanyahu

YERUSHALAYIM
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett seen during a plenum session in the assembly hall of the Knesset on Wednesday. (Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)

MK Shirly Pinto (Yamina) arrived at the Knesset plenum on Wednesday afternoon to participate in the votes, just six days after giving birth.

Pinto had expressed her willingness to come to the Knesset whenever needed, because without her the coalition has a majority of only one MK, 60-59.

Earlier Wednesday, fellow Yamina MK Abir Kara announced that he would boycott voting in the Knesset to protest a decision by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s Coronavirus Cabinet decision to require a green pass to enter a shopping mall. Kara, who headed an organization of independent workers, said the decision was unacceptable.

Kara later returned to the plenum, but Pinto had to stay there, with her baby, because Ra’am MK Waleed Taha left with his own protest.

Taha complained that Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked was preventing the passage of his bill that would hook up thousands of illegally built Arab homes to the national electricity grid. He wrote on social media that Shaked lied about the cost of the bill.

Meanwhile, instead of placing the blame on an MK in his own party, Bennett blamed Pinto’s arrival on opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who did not permit his MKs to pair off with Pinto.

“The opposition leader’s insistence on not pairing off with Pinto is a new low in the behavior of one human to another and in how a new mother is treated,” Bennett wrote on social media.

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