Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday accused law enforcement of detaining employees of his office “in basements” without access to a lawyer in an attempt to extract false statements against him.
“It pains us very much that the lives of young people are being destroyed with false claims in order to harm the right-wing government,” said the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
The statement came shortly after the lawyer of one of the Israel Defense Forces officers suspected of leaking confidential files concerning the Gaza hostages claimed that the documents had been handed to the premier.
Four IDF servicemembers and a former PMO spokesman have been arrested as part of the investigation into the alleged leak of the files, which indicate that Hamas is not interested in a ceasefire deal and is only using negotiations to ramp up domestic pressure on the Israeli government.
Netanyahu’s office stated on Tuesday: “In a democratic country, people are not arrested and held for 20 days in basements—while preventing them from meeting with a lawyer for many days—because of a leak, just to extract false statements against the prime minister from them.”
Accusing law enforcement of “abuse,” Netanyahu’s statement called the mounting police probes into his office “all the more outrageous because not a single investigation was launched into the flood of criminal leaks from the Cabinet and negotiating team during the year-long war.”
Those “criminal leaks exposed confidential security information to Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas while causing great damage to Israel’s security and the effort to free the hostages,” the statement concluded.
On Sunday, Netanyahu blamed “fake news” for the mounting probes into alleged misconduct by his employees.
“Over the past days, in an orchestrated and well-timed manner, they are trying to threaten me and my people in the middle of a war that I am leading—and fabricate scandals out of thin air,” a statement said.
“We know exactly what is going on here: It is an organized witch hunt designed to harm the country’s leadership and weaken us during a war,” he charged, adding that “the Israeli people know the truth.”
Netanyahu’s remarks came in the wake of a Kan News report naming his chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, as the suspect in a probe into alleged attempts to alter records of wartime government meetings.
Israel’s Channel 13 reported on Saturday that the police had questioned PMO officials in connection with multiple allegations tied to the office.
Though the premier himself has not been formally accused in any of the probes, he last week slammed the developments as an “unprecedented campaign against the Prime Minister’s Office in the midst of a war.”
“As with the previous attempts to inflate accusations against the prime minister and those around him, the present matter will also not yield anything whatsoever, but will certainly lead to difficult questions regarding arbitrary enforcement, which lacks both precedent and foundation,” he added.
