The District Court hearing in the cases against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday revealed more shocking police improprieties and illegal actions confirmed in testimony by a police investigator.
It was revealed during the hearing that Israel Police and the prosecution obtained wiretapping warrants in Case 1000 by misleading the court to believe that investigators were examining particularly serious suspicions—bribery and money laundering—even though these suspicions were not part of the case and had never been authorized for investigation by then-Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit.
Former police officer Michal Elam—who served in the Intelligence Assessment Division of Lahav 433 and investigated Cases 1000 and 2000—revealed a series of investigative actions carried out without being reported in real time to the Attorney General and without being disclosed to the defense.
She testified in court that numerous individuals connected to the prime minister were illegally wiretapped. She described the scope of the warrants as exceptionally broad and acknowledged that they were not transferred to the defense and were not disclosed to the court. She also admitted that she searched the mobile phone of Netanyahu’s aide, Perach Lerner, without a valid search warrant, during which she looked, among other things, for correspondence involving senior politicians—including Ayelet Shaked and Yuli Edelstein—without authorization.
During cross-examination, she was asked who else was wiretapped besides Natan Eshel, and she claimed that she doesn’t remember but confirmed that it was “dozens of people.”
At this point, Judge Moshe Bar-Am intervened and noted that these were “extremely unusual” orders, asserting that “these were far from routine warrants. You’re going to court about a prime minister; this is not a regular event,” hinting that it is hard to believe that so many warrants would be forgotten, reinforcing the defense’s concerns about the conduct of the investigators.
In response, Elam claimed, “The fact that it was a case involving a prime minister—for me it was just a case. I didn’t care who it was.” When asked what she did remember, she estimated that she came to court “more than five times” to obtain warrants and sometimes “said nothing” to the judges.
Journalist Amit Segal responded to the report by stating that “it became clear from Elam’s testimony that there is a whole world of investigative actions that were hidden from the Attorney General and the defense,” and that Elam appealed “dozens of times with requests for wiretaps” based on suspicions that were never approved for investigation.”
Likud spokesman Guy Levy stated that “this was the most embarrassing testimony I’ve heard since the start of this trial. She was the head of the assessment desk in Lahav 433, and she doesn’t remember whom she investigated, what she investigated, whose phones she wiretapped, or whom she conducted communications research on. She doesn’t remember the requests and documents she herself wrote and signed, and she doesn’t recall them even when they’re shown to her. She simply doesn’t remember anything!”
“This is what the leadership of the police looked like—the people who back then led the investigation of the prime minister and who operate today like a criminal organization!”
It’s hard to believe that any civilized country in the world would continue to conduct a trial in which such shocking revelations are revealed week after week instead of arresting the police investigators. Instead, the court forces the prime minister of a country facing the most serious security challenges in the world to appear in court for hours three times a week.
At this stage, no official response from the prosecution or the police to the claims has been presented. The hearing is expected to continue as part of the defense case, after the prosecution waived summoning Elam as a prosecution witness.
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