Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday he was suing Yair Golan—who leads The Democrats Party—for defamation, demanding 320,000 shekels ($86,500) in compensation.
The suit filed by Netanyahu’s lawyers, which also demands that Golan refrain from spreading further slander, came in response to March 31 remarks in which the left-wing leader had said that the premier should “be investigated on the suspicion that he sold Israel’s security for profit.
“He should be probed for the fact that the money that funded Hamas and the October [7, 2023] massacre reached the top levels of his office—and possibly even him,” Golan added, in reference to the recent arrest of two of Netanyahu’s aides on suspicion of illegal dealings with Qatar.
Netanyahu’s attorneys noted that The Democrats used Golan’s speech in an online fundraising appeal, accusing the party of promoting “fake news, wild incitement and slander with the intention of causing harm, while doing so for the sake of money.”
The Israel Police’s Lahav 433 National Unit for International Crimes and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) arrested Yonatan Urich and Eli Feldstein, a current and former aide to Netanyahu, respectively, earlier this week.
Urich and Feldstein are reportedly suspected of contact with a foreign agent, money laundering, bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
The Qatar probe was launched in response to allegations that Feldstein, while employed as a spokesman on military affairs for the prime minister, also worked for a firm seeking to boost Doha’s image.
Netanyahu, who testified to police in the affair on Monday, has denounced the Qatar probe as aimed at bringing down his government by targeting staff of the Prime Minister’s Office.
“This is a political witch-hunt aimed solely at one thing—preventing the dismissal of the head of the Shin Bet and bringing about the downfall of a right-wing prime minister,” stated the premier on Monday evening.
In an additional video statement on Wednesday, Netanyahu described Qatar as “a complex country, not a simple country,” while emphasizing that Doha is not designated as an enemy country, “and many praise it.
“Do you know who really praised Qatar? First of all, the opposition leader, Yair Lapid,” charged Netanyahu. In January, Lapid met with senior Qatari officials and said Doha wanted to broker an agreement with the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip “as soon as possible.”
Qatar, which has hosted Hamas’s leadership and has provided the organization with hundreds of millions of dollars, played a role in mediating the freedom of hostages held by the terrorist group.
Doha has rejected accusations of playing a double game, saying that the United States requested that it open the mediation channel with Hamas.