Netanyahu’s associates said to take surveillance footage of scuffle between Gallant, security guard at PM’s office

Associates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gathered surveillance camera footage of a scuffle between recently-fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and security staff at the Prime Minister’s Office at the IDF’s Kirya headquarters in Tel Aviv, according to the Ynet news site.

The video footage was gathered with the intention of using it to discredit the defense minister, who Netanyahu fired this week citing a lack of mutual trust during a time of war.

According to the Ynet report, the incident in question took place on October 12, 2023, five days after the war in Gaza erupted with Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre.

Gallant is said to have arrived late to a meeting at Netanyahu’s office in Tel Aviv, having been told that it would be held in the “the pit,” the Kirya military headquarters’ underground command room.

According to the report, he was shocked when he was then forbidden from entering the Prime Minister’s Office, and a physical confrontation broke out between Gallant and one of the security guards.

The report quotes an unnamed source as saying that former Likud spokesman Jonatan Urich had “removed the footage from the security cameras in order to use it against Gallant or to threaten him.”

Urich claims not to be aware of the incident, Ynet reports.

A senior political official cited in the report says that at the time, Netanyahu and his associates would frequently attempt to “humiliate” Gallant.

Netanyahu fired Gallant for the second time this week, having previously dismissed and then reinstated him in March 2023.

Gallant was at the helm of the Defense Ministry when Hamas committed its deadly terror assault in southern Israel on October 7 last year. He remained in his post throughout the subsequent war in the Gaza Strip, the fighting on the northern border and the ground operation in southern Lebanon.