Prosecutors close brutality probe against far-right MK Almog Cohen

The State Attorney’s Office on Sunday announced that it had shuttered its criminal probe into MK Almog Cohen of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party over allegations that he had used violence against a civilian during his service in the Israel Police over a decade ago.

Just over three months after the start of the probe, prosecutors announced that “after examining the evidence, it was found that the evidentiary material does not provide any foundation to put him [Cohen] on trial.”

The investigation centered on an alleged violent act he carried out in 2013 while an officer in the Yasam special riot police unit, after the MK posted a photo online last year which appeared to show him forcefully holding down several people alongside the caption “Those below remember what I did in the army.”

Hebrew media reports said that a complaint was filed around the time of the incident but closed when the officer in question could not be identified, but after Cohen’s post surfaced online, the complainants came forward again and the attorney general ordered the case reopened.

The Lahav 433 investigative unit questioned Cohen over the incident in January, leading Otzma Yehudit leader and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to denounce the attorney general for “political persecution.”

“Unfortunately, this is a well-known method of officials in the Justice Ministry — to hold so-called criminal cases against Otzma Yehudit people in order to grab them by the throat. The time has come for the Justice Ministry to stop with this method, this is not the way of democracy,” Ben Gvir declared on Sunday.

מועמד עוצמה יהודית אלמוג כהן התגאה בתמונה של שוטרים במעצר וכתב: "אלו שלמטה זוכרים מה עשיתי בצבא".
העצורים זיהו עצמם: תושבי רהט שנעצרו ב-2013 והתלוננו על התעללות קשה שעברו במעצר. התיק נסגר לאחר שלא הצליחו לזהות את השוטרים.
סנגורם: לחקור את כהן ולהעמידו לדיןhttps://t.co/HNm1NzVUKM pic.twitter.com/OnfXTcCSGj

— Josh Breiner (@JoshBreiner) October 31, 2022

Cohen, a freshman lawmaker, has developed a reputation as a firebrand, calling for opposition leaders to “be put in handcuffs,” screaming at the families of hostages held in Gaza that they were “representing Hamas,” and being reprimanded by the Knesset Ethics Committee for likening Arab party MKs to sheep.

He was also temporarily suspended from Twitter last January after tweeting his support for a deadly IDF raid and urging soldiers to “keep killing them.”

The news of the closure of the investigation into Cohen came only ten days after government prosecutors ended another probe into fellow Otzma Yehudit MK Zvika Fogel, who had been accused of incitement after he appeared to back extremist settlers who torched Palestinian homes and vehicles in the West Bank.

Last year, Fogel stated that he wanted to see a “closed, burnt Huwara” after rioters rampaged through the town in response to the killing of two Israeli brothers in a terror attack there.

“That’s the only way to achieve deterrence. After a murder like yesterday’s, we need burning villages when the IDF doesn’t act,” Fogel told Galey Israel Radio at the time, though he later claimed that his words had been “distorted” and that he was calling on the military to act, not private citizens.

Ben Gvir, who was himself previously convicted for incitement to violence, also welcomed the end of the investigation into Fogel, calling it a “political investigation for all intents and purposes and an attempt to hold him by the throat and threaten him.”