If former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signs a plea bargain that forces him to resign from political life, the citizens of Israel will lose the person they believe is most suited to lead a government, according to an Israel Hayom poll conducted this week amid recent reports of a potential plea deal between Netanyahu and Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit.

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The poll, which was conducted on Tuesday by the Maagar Mochot research institute for Israel Hayom, found that 34% of the people questioned believe Netanyahu is the best person for the job of prime minister. Lagging in a distant second, just 17% of those questioned said Yair Lapid is most suited for the position. Current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, was believed to be most suitable by just 6% of the people questioned, even less than several senior Likud members (described in the survey as Netanyahu's "competitors"), and even less than Benny Gantz (7%).

The belief in the political system was and remains that if Netanyahu concludes that his chances of becoming prime minister again in the coming years are high, while his trial is ongoing, he will not sign a plea agreement; and that if he feels those chances are slim, he will sign one.

The poll, which included a representative sample of the adult population in Israel of 504 people, with a maximum sampling error of 4.4%, also found that Netanyahu still lacks several mandates to return to power – assuming that Bennett's Yamina party won't join a Netanyahu-led government. The Likud, according to the poll, would increase its number of seats to 34 under Netanyahu, and that the remainder of the right-wing-Haredi bloc currently in the Opposition would have 58 mandates. If Yamina joins, this bloc under Netanyahu would have 63 mandates.

Yamina, based on the poll, would receive just five mandates. Gideon Sa'ar's New Hope party would receive a mere three mandates and fail to pass the electoral threshold. Among those who voted for Yamina in the election for the 24th Knesset, only one-third said they would vote for the party again. Of those voters, 19% said they would vote for the Likud party, while 13% said they'd vote for the Religious Zionist Party (upping the number of its mandates to eight). One-quarter of the people questioned in the poll are "sitting on the fence" and presently don't know which party to support. New Hope voters mainly dispersed between supporting Likud (19%), Yamina (12%), and Blue and White (4%). Overall, 29% of New Hope voters said they were still undecided over which party to support.  

Public opinion divided over plea deal

The political system is still unsure if the coming days will bring an end to the Netanyahu era, as are potential voters. And yet, the results of the poll indicate that right now, the public prefers one candidate to replace Netanyahu as leader of the Opposition – Nir Barkat. If Barkat is elected to lead Likud, it would result in fewer mandates, but not by much. 

A Barkat-led Likud would receive 29 mandates, which together with the right-wing bloc in the Opposition would be worth 59 mandates. Similar to Netanyahu, Barkat would lack a majority in the Knesset without Yamina. However, there is speculation that right-wing parties in the coalition could support Barkat and join a government under him, contrary to the scenario in which Netanyahu would continue to lead Likud.

With that, if Likud is headed by Yuli Edelstein or Israel Katz, the largest party currently in the Knesset would receive significantly fewer mandates and essentially fall behind Yesh Atid. Edelstein, according to the poll, would lead to Likud to just 16 mandates, while Katz would lead the party to 15.

And what does the public think about a potential plea deal? Apparently, it is extremely divided. The poll examined who the winner and loser of such a deal would be, and found that 36% of those questioned believe the State Attorney's Office and attorney general will have conceded more to reach a plea based on the parameters described in media reports. On the other hand, 23% of those questioned believe Netanyahu will have lost if such a plea deal is finalized. In the middle, 29% of those questioned said both sides will have conceded equally, while 12% believe neither side will have conceded. 

Although the distribution is not clear-cut, it's fair to note that supporters of right-wing parties generally believe Netanyahu will have conceded more in such a plea bargain, while supporters of left-wing parties believe the attorney general and State Attorney's Office will have conceded more to reach the reported plea agreement.

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Attorneys Amit Hadad and Noa Milstein, who are representing Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu in three cases of alleged graft, filed a request on Tuesday with Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit to open a probe to identify the source of leaks about the investigation into the former prime minister.

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"The flood of leaks from the case under discussion is unprecedented and destructive to the management of a fair trial," Netanyahu's attorneys wrote.

"The timing of the leaks creates the strong suspicion that it aimed to influence testimony in an unacceptable manner, and even lead to [witnesses] coordinating their stories," they said.

Hadad and Milstein went on to detail a series of leaks published in various media outlets prior to being presented to the defense team.

Earlier Tuesday, the court voiced criticism of the leaks, with one judge saying, "This is very serious. What will happen later if this is the situation now?"

"We cannot ignore the leaks. We expect the investigative authorities to clarify them and do everything necessary to prevent future leaks," the judges wrote.

The petition to Mendelblit came after Netanyahu made his first appearance in court in over six months as former aide Nir Hefetz prepared to take the stand against him.

Hefetz is a star prosecution witness in the case against Netanyahu, with his close proximity to the Netanyahu during several years in office a key part of the evidence. Hefetz left a long career in journalism in 2009 to work as a spokesman for Netanyahu's government, then in 2014 became the Netanyahu family's spokesman and adviser.

Netanyahu entered the courtroom Tuesday accompanied by a lawyer, his younger son, Avner, and a pair of supporters from his Likud party. The security presence around the building was much smaller than past sessions, when Netanyahu was the prime minister.

His lawyers immediately asked that Tuesday's session be delayed following reports that another witness had come forward with new evidence alleging that Netanyahu's wife, Sara, had accepted an expensive bracelet as a gift from two billionaire friends, Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and Australian billionaire James Packer.

Netanyahu's lawyers argued that the former prime minister and his wife were caught off-guard by the allegations and had the right to study the evidence before Hefetz took the stand.

After a short recess, the court accepted the request and postponed Hefetz's testimony until next Monday.

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A German court has set a trial date for a 100-year-old man who is charged with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin during World War II.

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A spokeswoman for the Neuruppin state court said Monday that the trial is set to begin in early October. The centenarian's name wasn't released in line with German privacy laws.

The suspect is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing.

Authorities say that despite his advanced age, the suspect is considered fit enough to stand trial, though the number of hours per day the court is in session may have to be limited.

"A medical evaluation confirms that he is fit to stand trial in a limited way," court spokeswoman Iris le Claire said.

The Neuruppin office was handed the case in 2019 by the special federal prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes. The state court in Neuruppin is based northwest of the town of Oranienburg, where Sachsenhausen was located.

The defendant is said to live in the state of Brandenburg outside of Berlin, local media reported.

Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 just north of Berlin as the first new camp after Adolf Hitler gave the SS full control of the Nazi concentration camp system. It was intended to be a model facility and training camp for the labyrinthine network that the Nazis built across Germany, Austria and occupied territories.

More than 200,000 people were held there between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands of inmates there died of starvation, disease, forced labor and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations including shootings, hangings and gassing.

Exact numbers on those killed vary, with upper estimates of some 100,000, though scholars suggest figures of 40,000 to 50,000 are likely more accurate.

In its early years, most prisoners were either political prisoners or criminal prisoners, but also included some Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. The first large group of Jewish prisoners was brought there in 1938 after Kirstallnacht.

During the war, Sachsenhausen was expanded to include Soviet prisoners of war – who were shot by the thousands – as well as others.

Like in other camps, Jewish prisoners were singled out at Sachsenhausen for particularly harsh treatment, and most who remained alive by 1942 were sent to the Auschwitz death camp.

Sachsenhausen was liberated in April 1945 by the Soviets, who turned it into a brutal camp of their own.

In a different case, a 96-year-old woman will go on trial in late September in the northern German town of Itzehoe. The woman, who allegedly worked during the war as the secretary for the SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp, has been charged with over 10,000 counts of accessory to murder earlier this year.

Her case and the charges against the 100-year-old suspect both rely on recent legal precedent in Germany establishing that anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted for accessory to the murders committed there.

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Discussions of Cases 2,000 and 4,000 involving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been postponed due to the strict lockdown, Jerusalem District Court judges Rivka Friedman-Feldman, Moshe Bar-Am, and Oded Shaham announced Friday.

Case 2,000 focuses on an illicit deal Netanyahu allegedly tried to strike with Yedioth Ahronoth publisher Arnon Mozes under which Yedioth would soften its aggressive anti-Netanyahu stance in return for the prime minister using his influence to curtail the activities of Israel Hayom, Yedioth's chief rival.

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Case 4,000 centers around the Bezeq telecommunications corporation and the Walla news website, which Bezeq owns. Netanyahu, who held the communications portfolio until February 2017, is suspected of having offered Bezeq controlling shareholder Shaul Elovitch corporate benefits worth hundreds of millions of shekels in exchange for favorable coverage of him and his family on Walla.

On Thursday, Supreme Court Chief Justice Esther Hayut announced that starting on Sunday and until the current lockdown ends, Israel's courts would postpone hearings for traffic, small claims, and local cases. However, judges have the discretion to decide not to  postpone a given hearing. 

Hayut also said that that litigants and lawyers who wished to postpone the date of a hearing for reasons related to the lockdown could submit such requests to the court system, and that all deadlines currently in effect would remain in effect until a decision were made otherwise. 

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One wore civilian clothes, the other an army uniform. They said they were from the Iraqi army's 20th Division, which controls the northern Iraqi town of Badoush. In fact, they were Islamic State group militants who had come down from the surrounding mountains into Badoush with one thing on their mind: Revenge.

Around 13 more gunmen were waiting outside. The fighters pulled Khadija's husband and his two brothers into the yard and shot them dead, leaving them in a pool of blood – punishment for providing information to the Iraqi military.

"How can we live after this?" Khadija said. The three brothers were the providers for the entire family. "They left their children, their livestock, their wives, and their elderly father who doesn't know what to do now."

A year and a half after the Islamic State group was declared defeated in Iraq, the militants still evoke fear in the lands of their former so-called caliphate across northern Iraq. The fighters, hiding in caves and mountains, emerge at night to carry out kidnappings, killings and roadside ambushes, aimed at intimidating locals, silencing informants and restoring the extortion rackets that financed ISIS's rise to power six years ago.

It is part of a hidden but relentless fight between the group's remnants waging an insurgency and security forces trying to stamp them out, relying on intelligence operations, raids and searches for sleeper cells among the population.

The militants' ranks number between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters around Iraq, according to one Iraqi intelligence official.

"Although the territory once held by the so-called caliphate is fully liberated, Daesh [Islamic State] fighters still exhibit their intention to exert influence and stage a comeback," said Maj. Gen. Chad Franks, deputy commander-operations and intelligence for the U.S.-led coalition, using the Arabic acronym for the group.

In towns around the north, Iraqi soldiers knock on doors in the middle of the night, looking for suspects, based on intelligence tips or suspicious movements. They search houses and pull people away for questioning.

Anyone is seen as a potential ISIS collaborator or sympathizer. In February, Human Rights Watch accused authorities of torturing suspects to extract confessions of belonging to ISIS, an accusation the Interior Ministry has denied. Detainees are pushed by the thousands into what critics call sham trials, with swift verdicts – almost always guilty – based on almost no evidence beyond confessions or unaccountable informants ' testimony. The legacy of guilt weighs heavily especially on women and children, who face crushing discrimination because of male relatives seen as supporting IS.

AP journalists embedded with a battalion of the 20th Division last month and witnessed several of its raids at Badoush.

Badoush, on the Tigris River just outside the city of Mosul, is a key battleground because it was once one of the most diehard ISIS strongholds.

In the summer of 2014, it was a launching pad for the militants' blitz that overran Mosul and much of northern Iraq. ISIS built a strong financial base by extorting money from the owners of Badoush's many industrial facilities. Security officials estimate two-thirds of its population – which numbered around 25,000 before the war – were at one point members or supporters of the group.

Now the population is divided. Residents who suffered at the hands of ISIS or lost loved ones to the group are suspicious of neighbors they believe still support the militants. Within families, some members belonged to the group and others opposed it.

The Badoush area alone has seen 20 ISIS attacks, from bombings to targeted killings, since it was retaken from the militants in March 2017, according to the Kurdish Security Council. The militants brag about the attacks in videos that show fighters storming houses and killing purported "apostates" and spies.

"The operations that we do now rely on intelligence by following up the families of Daesh," said Maj. Khalid Abdullah Baidar al-Jabouri, commander of a battalion in the 20th Division, speaking at his base just outside Badoush.

Distrust runs deep among the residents.

In one raid witnessed by the AP, troops banged on the door of a man who had returned to Badoush a day earlier. He had fled town just before the IS takeover in the summer of 2014 and stayed in the Kurdish town of Sulaimaniyah throughout their rule. But his father and one of his brothers remained and joined IS.

When the man returned, a local sheikh immediately notified the military. In the raid, the soldiers searched the house and checked his phone records for any suspicious calls abroad.

They asked him about his father and brother. "I swear, they destroyed my life," the man said. When asked about ISIS, he insisted, "I never came face to face with them."

The soldiers took him away for questioning, as his three little sisters shook and cried with fear. He was later released.

On another occasion, an informant told the army he had spotted explosives-laden suicide belts in the mountains while out picnicking and looking for truffles. Presumably, they had been dropped off there for attackers to retrieve and use. Wearing a balaclava to keep his identity secret, he led the army to the spot, where they found the belts and detonated them remotely.

"People in the town are very cooperative," says Mohammed Fawzi, an intelligence officer. "But don't forget that in one house one person was with Daesh and another member was killed by them. It's very complicated."

Among the most chilling ISIS attacks was the Jan. 3 killing of the three Abd brothers, carried out with brutal precision.

The strangers claiming to be soldiers who entered the Abd's house said they just wanted to ask a few questions and that it wouldn't take long.

Khadija Abd was immediately suspicious. Her husband, Inad Hussein Abd and two of his brothers, Abdulmuhsin and Mohammed, were informants for the Iraqi military and knew the 20th Division's soldiers personally. So why didn't they recognize these men?

After searching the house, the intruders turned aggressive. They dragged the three brothers outside and beat them. When Khadija tried to stop them, she was beaten too. The fighters put her, the other wives on the farm and their children in a room and told them, "If anyone comes out, we shoot you in the forehead."

Khadija could hear the men murmuring outside until 10 p.m. in a dialect of Arabic she couldn't understand. Then it was silent. All they heard was the barking of dogs. Khadija thought the men had taken the three brothers away.

At dawn, she went to get water from the well. She spotted her husband's yellow sleeve in the grass. All three brothers lay on the blood-soaked ground. The militants had used silencers, so the family never heard the gunshots.

Instinctively, she looked for a cellphone to call for help. "Honestly, I couldn't even cry. I didn't cry or scream," she said.

Memories of the attack return to Khadija in her dreams – how her daughters screamed "Dad! Dad!" when they saw his body, how one tried to pull out a bullet out of her dead father's cheek. "Mom, it won't come out," she told Khadija. Her son is now too afraid to leave his room.

To the children, it's the army that killed their father, she said. "They don't understand anything that's going on."

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