Suspect arrested over threatening letter to Netanyahu left on brother’s grave
26-year-old from Kfar Saba in police, Shin Bet custody for note calling on premier to reconquer Gaza Strip, bring home captives
Police and the Shin Bet security agency announced on Saturday evening that a suspect had been arrested over a threatening letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was found a day earlier on the grave of the premier’s brother, Yoni Netanyahu, in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery.
The two law enforcement bodies said in a joint statement that investigators had used a variety of methods to quickly find their suspect, a 26-year-old resident of Kfar Saba who was located in the country’s south and taken in for questioning at the offices of police’s cyber crime unit. The suspect may be brought for a remand hearing at the Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court, police said.
Some Hebrew media outlets reported that the suspect has a history of mental health problems.
The incident came amid stepped-up protests against Netanyahu and his hardline government after it decided to push ahead with the controversial legislation to overhaul Israel’s judicial system, and amid heightened tensions and political rhetoric that has seen threats made against leaders on both sides of the dispute.
However, the letter did not appear to be connected to the judicial overhaul controversy, and made demands that Netanyahu reconquer the Gaza Strip and secure the release of Israeli hostages held there by Hamas.
Much of the handwritten letter is addressed to the late Yoni Netanyahu.
“What’s happening Yoni, you hero? What’s going on up there?” the letter says, according to a copy published by Hebrew media.
“I was asked to inform your brother, Pee-Pee Netanyahu, that he has a little or a lot going for him, but it’s over,” the note continues, in an apparent gibe at the prime minister’s nickname “Bibi.”
מכתב האיום שהונח על קברו של יוני נתניהו | לידיעה המלאה >> https://t.co/AFSpAFZqu7@SuleimanMas1 pic.twitter.com/ccWS4RdQS2
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“From here, Mt. Herzl, this sanctified place, the clock is ticking backward, until [October 13-14 when] your brother, the son of a bitch, thinks he’ll reach age 74,” the letter said referencing the prime minister’s birthday according to the Hebrew calendar.
The letter goes on to say “let it be clear that this is a threat of the first order,” next to which “red alert level” is written in English accompanied by a smiley face.
“Bibi, you’re no better than [Ariel] Sharon,” the writer added, before wishing that Netanyahu suffers a fate worse than the former premier, who died in 2014 after eight years in a vegetative state that followed a massive stroke.
After lobbing further invectives against Netanyahu, the writer stated he has several missions: reconquering the Gaza Strip and returning “the body of my counselor, Hadar Goldin, and the rest of the captives.”
The Hamas terror group, which conquered Gaza two years after Sharon led a full military and civilian withdrawal from the enclave in 2005, is holding the bodies of Goldin and Oron Shaul — both of whom were both killed fighting in the 2014 Gaza war — along with two living Israelis believed to have entered the Strip on their own accord.
“Fuck you, you lazy whore,” the letter concluded in English.
The threatening letter came less than a week after Netanyahu and his family visited the grave to mark the 47th anniversary of Yoni Netanyahu’s death leading an elite IDF force in the Entebbe hostage rescue.
The July 4, 1976 operation saw the rescue of 98 hostages taken captive on June 27, 1976 by Palestinian and German terrorists, who hijacked an Air France jet flying from Tel Aviv to Paris. The plane was diverted to Uganda, where the hijackers were welcomed by dictator Idi Amin.
Four hostages were killed during the operation, along with Yoni Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has received several death threats in recent months, with most of them connected to his hardline government’s controversial legislation.
