Likud MK Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet security service, says a TV report Thursday that claimed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Shin Bet security agency to tap the phones of the leaders of the Mossad and the army in 2011 was a “lie.”
“It is impossible that a prime minister asks the head of the Shin Bet to eavesdrop on a certain person, let alone the leader of the Mossad or the [IDF] chief of staff,” Dichter writes in a Facebook post.
Dichter says there is little likelihood phone taps could be ordered directly by the premier, as any such eavesdropping is overseen directly by the attorney general and State Prosecutor’s Office.
Netanyahu has dismissed the report he asked for the phones of then-Mossad head Tamir Pardo and then-IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz to be tapped as a “complete lie.” Yoram Cohen, the Shin Bet head at the time, was quoted by Channel 10 as saying the report was “nonsense.”
Likud MK Avi Dichter chairs a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting on April 30, 2018. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
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