Bennett to PM: Apologize for lies about my wife

Education Minister Naftali Bennett said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be ashamed of trying to push negative stories about his wife in the media, after a Channel 2 News report emerged claiming the opposite.

The report focused on Bezeq majority shareholder Shaul Elovitch’s version of the story behind Case 4000, in which the police recommended charging Netanyahu with bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and to indict Elovitch on bribery charges as well.

Channel 2 reported that sources close to Elovitch provided an example of a time when Netanyahu asked the Walla News site, which is owned by Bezeq, to post something and they refused. The story concerned Bennett’s wife, Gilat, who worked as a pastry chef in non-kosher restaurants in New York.

Gilat Bennett was secular when she married the now-minister, and has grown more observant over the subsequent years.

“This is a nasty, cowardly act,” Bennett wrote on Twitter. “[Netanyahu] personally bothered to call the owners of Walla to hurt my wife…Shame on you. I married Gilat, a wonderful woman, an Israeli from a secular house with values, and together we built a wonderful, religious, Zionist home. My family is the pride of my life. Don’t apologize to me; I’m not interested. Apologize to my wife,” Bennett added.

The Likud’s spokesman Yonatan Urich did not deny the report, but said that “Bennett’s hypocrisy knows no limits. He is the one who needs to apologize. Many journalists know that from the moment he left Netanyahu’s office [where he worked as chief of staff to Netanyahu as opposition leader] Bennett has not stopped giving negative briefings about Sara Netanyahu at every opportunity.”

Similarly, the prime minister’s son Yair Netanyahu wrote on Facebook: “Nu, you did this a million times against my mother with [Yediot owner] Noni Mozes and with every possible media editor in the country. So what?”