Yair Netanyahu, the firebrand son of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on Monday accused the Shin Bet security service of trying to overthrow his father’s government and of torturing IDF soldiers.
His series of posts on X came amid a flurry of probes into figures in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) relating to leaks of classified intelligence documents, accusations that minutes of cabinet war meetings were doctored and allegations of blackmailing a senior military officer.
Four members of the IDF and a spokesman for Netanyahu, Eli Feldstein, have been detained as part of the investigation into the theft of top-secret army intelligence documents.
“Is this the same Shin Bet that is arresting and torturing IDF officers over complete nonsense, the same Shin Bet that a few months ago released the Gazan Dr. Mengele — the director of the Shifa hospital — together with dozens of terrorists, with the excuse there was no room in the prisons?” Yair Netanyahu posted.
In another post he accused the Shin Bet of trying to overthrow his father.
“We have had a coup against the democratic choice of the people by the prosecutors, the media and the courts,” he said, referring to his father’s trial on corruption charges. “But we have not yet had a coup against the democratic choice of the people by all of the above and the Shin Bet and the military.”
“[It’s] a banana republic like South America in the 60s,” wrote Netanyahu, who has been living in Florida for the past year.
FilE: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) and son Yair in Tel Aviv, January 23, 2020. (Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
In another post, he called the probes into the PMO a “blood libel and gaslighting designed to hide from the public the deliberations of the junta on the night of October 7 that excluded the prime minister,” presumably referring to a telephone consultation held by IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi in the early morning hours of October 7, in which security chiefs agreed to monitor concerning signals from Gaza but failed to identify and head off the devastating attack that was about to unfold.
The premier himself on Sunday accused Israeli media of opening a “front” against him alongside Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iran-backed groups, alleging that investigations into the scandals linked to his office were part of an attempt to weaken the nation during wartime.
The prime minister said that the string of scandals in recent weeks was “an organized hunt designed to harm the country’s leadership and weaken us in the midst of a war.”
Yair Netanyahu is known for his provocative online presence and has faced legal action on more than one occasion over his social media activity.
In recent months he has frequently attacked the security services and legal system, as well as protesters against the government’s contentious judicial overhaul.
An Israeli protesting plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government to overhaul the judicial system carries a caricature of son Yair Netanyahu, in Tel Aviv, Israel, April 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
In June, he shared a post casting top security chiefs as “fatal failures,” and last December, he liked a social media post accusing Halevi of initiating a de facto military coup on October 7, claiming without basis that the military’s top commander knew ahead of time of the devastating Hamas assault but did not tell the premier.
In September 2023, he shared a social media post against the imprisonment of a Jewish terrorist convicted of murdering three members of a Palestinian family by firebombing their home in a West Bank village in 2015.
In December 2022 he said that senior prosecutors and police had committed “treason” by allegedly framing his father, intimating that the crime was punishable by the death penalty.
In 2017, he made international headlines for posting a cartoon attacking critics of his parents using antisemitic canards.
Yair Netanyahu, who now resides near Miami, reportedly moved to Florida last year after the premier and his wife demanded that he stop posting on social media and not speak directly with lawmakers or ministers, amid accusations he was inflaming tensions in Israel and exacerbating a diplomatic rift with the United States.
Yair Netanyahu and Sara Netanyahu in the Knesset gallery as the new government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (not pictured) is sworn in at the Knesset in Jerusalem, on December 29, 2022. (Amir Cohen / Pool / AFP)
Along with his contentious social media presence, Yair Netanyahu has faced criticism for remaining in the US despite the outbreak of war, as tens of thousands of Israelis returned home to join the 300,000 reservists initially called up.
The controversial son of the prime minister has also faced scrutiny in recent months due to what many consider to be the excessive level of personal security that he receives.
It was reported in March that securing his stay in an extravagant apartment complex in Miami, with a chauffeur and a pair of bodyguards from the Shin Bet’s elite Unit 730, costs the state an estimated NIS 200,000 ($55,000) a month.
It is unclear why his security is covered by Unit 730, which is tasked with guarding only the seven top public officials in Israel: the president, prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister, speaker of the Knesset, opposition leader and Supreme Court president. Other protected people receive their security detail from the Prime Minister’s Office’s lower-ranking Magen unit.
