Defense panel fumes over ex-chairman’s report clearing PM in Gaza war

Likud MK Tzachi Hanegbi, who until recently headed the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, reportedly penned a report clearing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of any wrongdoing in his handling of the 2014 Gaza war and passed it off as the committee’s findings.

Channel 2 reported Wednesday that Hanegbi, who was appointed minister without portfolio earlier this week, had submitted a committee report that goes easy on the government’s performance in tackling the Hamas tunnel threat, leaving the other members of the high-level security committee fuming.

“This cover-up attempt spits in the face of the committee,” said Yesh Atid MK Ofer Shelah. “This is an insult to the soldiers that risked their lives or sacrificed them protecting the southern communities.”

“As a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, I led, along with other committee members, an unprecedented detailed investigation on various aspects of the operation. The process did not result in a [final] report solely for political reasons, which have now been exposed.”

Hanegbi wasn’t present in any of the meetings in which the committee debated the operation, said Shelah. He is “trying to create the impression there’s an alternate report,” which “was formulated without informing any of the committee members, to hide the truth from the public.”

Hanegbi this week was appointed minister without portfolio in the Prime Minister’s Office. The Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is now headed by Likud MK and former Shin Bet security agency chief Avi Dichter.

According to documents leaked last month from a damning State Comptroller report on the Gaza war, Netanyahu and former defense minister Ya’alon failed to provide the security cabinet with real-time updates regarding the imminent threat of war with Hamas, or the capabilities of the terror group’s cross-border attack tunnels.

The prime minister and the defense minister were also said to conceal warnings from the Shin Bet security agency, which raised the potential for war with Hamas in early July 2014, according to Channel 10. The 50-day conflict, known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge, began on July 8, 2014.

Members of the security cabinet were only apprised of the Shin Bet warning once the operation was underway, the report said.

According to the Maariv newspaper, among the officials hit hardest in the draft was then-IDF chief Benny Gantz, “who is exposed as a weak chief of staff who was out of touch with reality.”

Netanyahu, it added, “is depicted as having no crisis management abilities.”

The Yedioth Ahronoth daily said the draft found the security establishment “did not have a comprehensive plan for dealing with Hamas’s offensive tunnels” during the conflict.

Hamas’s tunnels were used to devastating effect on a number of occasions during the war to ambush IDF soldiers.

In February, the comptroller’s office released a statement pointing to severe failures to anticipate the tunnel threat.

“The draft as submitted points to gaps and failures, some severe, in the readiness for the tunnel threat and dealing with them,” it said.

Last month, Netanyahu and Ya’alon hit back, dismissing the report as “not serious.”

Sources close to the two men said they rejected the claims against them in the draft.

The Israeli military destroyed over 30 Hamas tunnels during the 2014 operation, and recently uncovered two sophisticated tunnels that lead into Israeli territory.

Following the conflict, Israel invested an estimated NIS 1 billion (approximately $250 million) into developing a detection system to locate such tunnels.