MK launches campaign to expose Netanyahu’s Gaza ‘failures’

Knesset member Erel Margalit of the Zionist Union has launched an online campaign demanding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu release a leaked State Comptroller report that reportedly details his government’s mishandling of Israel’s 2014 war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In reference to Netanyahu’s popular nickname — Bibi — Margalit’s website, bbfail.com, hosts an online petition calling on the prime minister to make public his “severe failures.”

“Netanyahu is choosing to hide the comptroller report on his failures during Operation Protective Edge, and he knows very well why that is,” the website reads. “Citizens of Israel want to know how the person responsible for their security handles himself, before he fails during the next war.”

In a promotional video for the campaign posted to Margalit’s Facebook page Sunday, he urged Israelis to sign the petition, vowing to “put out on the table what Netanyahu is trying to hide.

“The entire country was crippled for a period of 50 days, people were in shelters, the economy tanked and Ben Gurion Airport was closed,” he charged. “And instead of drawing lessons from it, he chooses to incite against the state comptroller personally.”

Margalit, who is said to be mulling a challenge to the soft-spoken Isaac Herzog for leadership of the Zionist Union, has previously leveled blunt criticism of Netanyahu and right-wing lawmakers.

He stirred controversy last month after releasing an expletive-laden video calling for the right wing to “give us back our country” and referring to members of the prime minister’s ruling Likud party as “clowns, cowards and psychopaths.”

State Comptroller Yosef Shapira’s new report, which was leaked to several outlets on Thursday, reportedly accuses Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and other government officials of whitewashing the threat posed by the Hamas terror group ahead of the 2014 war.

According to media sources who saw the 70-page document, Shapira’s accused Netanyahu and Ya’alon of failing 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 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.

Netanyahu has not publicly commented on the report, though a source close to the prime minister said he and Ya’alon rejected the claims against him and dismissed Shapira’s findings as “not serious.

“The operation was conducted with unprecedented transparency vis-à-vis the security cabinet. Over the course of the operation, Netanyahu convened the cabinet dozens of times, more than during any other [military] operation in history,” the source said last week.

On Sunday, Shapira requested that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit launch an investigation into the leaking of the confidential report.

Shortly after, opposition lawmakers from the Zionist Union and the Joint (Arab) List factions, as well as the Meretz party, garnered the necessary 53 signatures from MKs to call a special plenum discussion to discuss the leaked report.

The date for the plenum discussion has yet to be set, though reports indicate it could be held by next week.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.