Netanyahu opposed Shalit prisoner exchange — Barak

In another “Barak tapes” leak, the former prime minister and defense minister is heard yet against criticizing his former boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaking of the Shalit prisoner exchange, Barak tells his interviewers — who are working on his biography — that Netanyahu was opposed to the exchange of the captive IDF soldier for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, but gave in after Barak pressured him.

“Bibi [Netanyahu] is forced into action, and shows a side [to his personality] that is less elegant, less about self-control, less pretty, when he’s in a personal crisis over something,” Barak says in recordings he did not know would become public.

“As much as he was opposed to [the] Gilad Shalit [exchange], and I pressured him for months to do two things, to do Gilad Shalit and immediately afterward to pass in the government [and in] the Knesset [the recommendations of] the Shamgar Committee” that recommended changing Israel’s prisoner exchange policy.

“In the end he was convinced he had to free Shalit but wasn’t convinced to do the obvious next step [of passing Shamgar], and that’s how he found himself in the [June 2014] kidnapping of the three kids,” teenagers whose kidnapping by a Hamas-affiliated cell in the West Bank triggered that summer’s Gaza war.