The Jerusalem Post

Netanyahu dares Ashkenazi to reveal Harpaz tapes

- • By GIL HOFFMAN

All of the details regarding a controvers­ial forged document during the time of Blue and White MK Gabi Ashkenazi as IDF chief of staff must be revealed to the public ahead of the March 2 election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday night.

In a Facebook Live post, Netanyahu reacted to recordings revealed Sunday on Channel 13 of Ashkenazi and Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, who was the IDF’s chief lawyer at the time of the document’s publicatio­n in 2010.

“Gabi Ashkenazi should reveal all the recordings to the public,” Netanyahu said. “What is Ashkenazi afraid of?”

Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev said she had asked Mandelblit to insist on the Supreme Court ordering all the tapes revealed.

“It must come out,” Regev told Army Radio. “The public must know what was in the tapes, including alleged obstructio­n of justice. There cannot be one law for Netanyahu and one law for [Blue and White leader Benny] Gantz and for Mandelblit. Ashkenazi himself should insist on revealing all the transcript­s to the public.”

In a session of the Knesset plenum on Monday, Likud faction chairman Miki Zohar mocked Blue and White leaders about the reports.

“There was a very interestin­g investigat­ive report on a scandal of leaks involving the attorney-general and the IDF chief of staff, and this you don’t talk about,” Zohar shouted at Gantz and MK Yair Lapid. “This is clean? Only you are the saints, the honest, the pure.”

Lapid responded by holding up three fingers in honor of Netanyahu’s three criminal probes.

Ashkenazi responded to the reports in an interview with Channel 13 on Monday night. He said the recordings were nearly a decade old and had been broadcast in the past. He said there were thousands of conversati­ons of him as IDF chief of staff that were checked by police, the state comptrolle­r and the attorney-general, who decided to close the investigat­ion. He said that by contrast, former prime minister Ehud Barak made sure the tapes from when he was IDF chief of staff were broken or burned.

“I do not know of a public figure revealed in such a manner,” he said. “I already said I should have behaved differentl­y in the episode but it is behind me. Everything was checked, and I have nothing to worry about.”

Channel 13 revealed new tapes Monday night, which showed how embarrasse­d Ashkenazi was in August 2010 after the document was revealed and it became clear how long he has had it.

A new survey taken by pollster Camil Fuchs for Channel 13 in the aftermath of its initial reports about Ashkenazi’s tapes found that if elections were held now, Blue and White would win 36 seats and Likud would win 33.

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