Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's leading challenger in his heated race for re-election is trying to play down an embarrassing phone hacking scandal that has erupted just as the ex-general is sliding in opinion polls.
Gantz's campaign confirmed late Thursday that the former military chief, who has been campaigning on his security credentials in a bid to end Netanyahu's decade-long rule, was the target of an Iranian hacking attack several months ago.
His party, meanwhile, insinuated that the information was leaked by political rivals on the Right who want to weaken his chances against Netanyahu, and has asked Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit to investigate the source of the leak.
In a message posted to his official Facebook page over the weekend, Netanyahu's office said: "The lies put forth by the candidate for half the premiership [referring to Gantz's agreement with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid to share the premiership on a rotational basis] won't help. The Shin Bet confirmed that the prime minister didn't know anything about the case involving Gantz. Even senior journalists are saying this."
Moreover, the Facebook post claimed, the accusation is an "attempt by Lapid and Gantz to distort the fact that the Iranian regime supports them openly and that they supported the nuclear deal with Iran while Netanyahu fought against it."
It was not clear what information Israel's archenemy had obtained from Gantz's smartphone. His campaign said the security lapse occurred months before he entered politics and suggested the leak was a politically motivated attempt to embarrass him ahead of April 9 elections.
"It should be emphasized that the incident in question happened some four years after Gantz finished his term as [military] chief of staff and the current timing of its publication raises many questions," Blue and White said in a statement.
A Likud spokesman responded: "We are not involved in this."
The revelation splashed across the internet, sending Gantz's new Blue and White party reeling. Gantz convened a surprise press conference Friday from Israel's southern border, where he tried to divert attention to a missile attack from Gaza on central Israel the previous night. Gantz has pointed to his leading role in Operation Protective Edge in 2014 as proof of his toughness.
Gantz provided few details about how he was hacked or what type of information might have fallen into the hands of Iranian intelligence. He attempted to play down the scandal as "merely unethical prying."
"We're fighting for our home and our struggle for democracy and ethics here," Gantz said, chiding reporters who asked about the hacking. "We're in the middle of an ongoing security event … and someone's putting out a political gossip story. I do not think Benny Gantz is the story here. There's no security issue there. No threat and no blackmail. I ask you all to be serious enough to deal with what's important."
Israel's Channel 12 news reported on Thursday that the Shin Bet security agency believed Iranian state intelligence had accessed the ex-general's personal information and correspondences and had informed him of the hack five weeks ago.
But the scandal is unlikely to disappear. In a front-page analysis Friday, Amos Harel, a commentator for the Haaretz daily newspaper argued that news of the breach could have far-reaching consequences, sending Gantz's party to "unforeseen lows."
After Gantz's maiden political speech and merger with Yesh Atid, another centrist party, his campaign surged in popularity. Opinion polls showed his alliance gaining against Netanyahu's Likud party, especially after Israel's attorney general recommended that the prime minister be indicted on corruption charges. But more recent polling indicates waning enthusiasm for Blue and White, with Likud holding steady.
In the meantime, MK Issawi Frej of the left-wing Meretz party has requested that an investigation be launched to discover who leaked the "Iranian breach" to the press.
Frej, a member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, submitted the request in a letter to committee chairman MK Avi Dichter (Likud), State Comptroller Yosef Shapira and Amir Keen, who heads the Defense Ministry's department that deals with field security (known by its Hebrew acronym MALMAB).
In his letter, Frej cited clause 117 of Israel's Penal Law, which states: "If a public servant delivered without lawful authority information that reached him by virtue of his office to a person not authorized to receive it, or if a person, having obtained information by virtue of his office as a public servant, delivers it without lawful authority – after he ceased being a public servant – to a person not authorized to receive it, then he is liable to three years imprisonment."
"In this case," Frej argued, "there's no doubt that classified information that wasn't supposed to be made public was transferred to a journalist by officials in the Shin Bet, or by other officials who received a report on the matter."
Frej added that a distinction must be made between the job of the press to bring information to the public and the job of the state and those working on its behalf to make sure classified information isn't leaked.
