Justice Noam Sohlberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee disclosed new details about the Shin Bet investigation into suspected foreign interference in Israel's elections on Tuesday. The disclosure came during a vote in the committee's presidium after members demanded information on the probe. Sohlberg presented a redacted passage he had agreed upon with Shin Bet chief David Zini.
"The intelligence presented by the professionals at the service appears to point to widespread phenomena of large sums of money flowing into Israel from foreign countries, originating with parties holding covert and even hostile interests, intended to advance foreign influence, and which in our view require deeper intelligence and investigative work," it reads. "The information gathered so far indicates that funding and foreign influence activities involving enormous sums are a widespread phenomenon, on a scale exceeding thousands of people, and possibly more. At this stage, we must complete additional intelligence-gathering and investigative steps, in order to obtain intelligence that will make it possible to connect the dots and to determine, with a high degree of certainty and substantiation, the scope of the phenomenon."
