The criminal trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resumed on Wednesday in the Tel Aviv District Court for the 59th day of his testimony and another full day of cross-examination in Case 4000, the Bezeq-Walla affair. Tuesday’s hearing was canceled at Netanyahu’s request due to what his office described as a diplomatic-security scheduling conflict, and Wednesday’s session was extended to 5 p.m. to compensate.
Netanyahu was indicted in 2020 on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust across Cases 1000, 2000, and 4000. In Case 4000, he is accused of pushing for regulatory benefits worth hundreds of millions of shekels to Shaul and Iris Elovitch, then-owners of Bezeq and the Walla news site, in exchange for systematically favorable coverage.
On Wednesday, prosecutor Yehudit Tirosh resumed her line of questioning in recent hearings, probing both how Netanyahu viewed Walla and the extent of his direct contact with Elovitch.
Netanyahu sought to frame his interest in the site as strategic rather than influence-seeking. “My interest in Walla wasn’t because of its power,” he said, “but because I thought there was a huge opportunity to turn it into another Ynet, a kind of Channel 14… I understood [that] here was a man with a tool in his hand that no one was stopping.” Tirosh countered that previous sessions had already shown that Walla was highly important to Netanyahu, and that his actual conduct toward the outlet – and toward Elovitch personally – told a different story.
114 phone contacts between Netanyahu and Elovitch
According to “media research” analyses submitted to the court, there were 114 phone contacts between Netanyahu and Elovitch during the relevant indictment period (2013-2015). When calls under 30 seconds were filtered out, 73 remained, ranging from half a minute to 27 minutes long. “Thirty seconds is not a trivial amount of time,” Tirosh stressed in court.
She pointed to two consecutive calls from 2013: a 34-second mobile call from Netanyahu to Elovitch, followed immediately by a 16-minute conversation on a landline. Her goal was to show that even the brief calls were functional – used to reach Elovitch and pass on messages – contrary to Netanyahu’s claim that such short connections could not carry substance.
Netanyahu rejected that characterization. He insisted that in “99% of cases” it was impossible, in the Prime Minister’s Office, to both connect the call and convey meaningful content within 20 to 30 seconds, because calls are screened by secretaries and aides. The idea that messages were routinely passed in such short bursts, he said, did not reflect how a PMO actually operates.
Tirosh then brought in a concrete example: Netanyahu’s 2015 interview on Walla with journalist Dov Gil-Har, which he had described in the past as having angered him greatly. Shortly after the interview, there was a roughly half-minute call from Netanyahu to Elovitch. In a message immediately following that call, Elovitch wrote to then-Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua that “the boss called and said they didn’t let him finish a single answer.” In his own direct testimony, Netanyahu has already acknowledged phoning Elovitch after that interview and “firing at him” – metaphorically – before media adviser Nir Hefetz continued the conversation.
Tirosh’s point was simple: If, in under 30 to 32 seconds, Netanyahu could connect, complain that he hadn’t been allowed to finish an answer, and set a tone for follow-up, then short calls could indeed carry substantial messages.
Netanyahu tried to contain the damage by casting this episode as an outlier. He said he could not testify about a specific single call and that, in his description of the routines of contact with Elovitch, he had given an accurate account “in 99% of cases.”
The prosecution then shifted to what it called the “ongoing dialogue” between the two men. Tirosh cited exchanges in which Elovitch told Yeshua that “the big boss is looking for me,” arguing that the very fact that Netanyahu was seeking him out – even before they spoke – was enough for Elovitch to infer what was expected, especially when negative items about the Netanyahus appeared on Walla.
Netanyahu pushed back, saying he could not know what was “in Elovitch’s head.” He acknowledged one specific “extreme” case that stuck in his memory: coverage relating to former residence manager Meni Naftali and lawsuits over conditions at the Prime Minister’s Residence, which he described as particularly sensitive and damaging. That, he said, justified intervention. Most other coverage, he maintained, “generally did not interest me.”
When Tirosh reminded him that courts had ruled in Naftali’s favor and awarded him compensation – and that appeals were rejected – Netanyahu responded, “Meni Naftali is a man for whom the truth is very far from his mouth.”
Throughout the hearing, defense attorney Amit Hadad repeatedly objected to what he described as long, narrative questions, as well as to the prosecution’s emphasis on call lengths and sequences. He suggested alternative explanations for the short-then-long call patterns, including secretarial transfers and technical issues, and argued that even 30- to 40-second calls did not necessarily amount to substantive conversations.
For the prosecution, the goal of the day was to chip away at Netanyahu’s efforts to portray his contact with Elovitch as limited, incidental, and largely unrelated to immediate coverage demands. The call logs, the timing around specific media events, and the internal messages from Walla’s leadership were presented as part of the coherent pattern of a prime minister who, according to the indictment, both understood the leverage Walla offered and used repeatedly.
Netanyahu, in turn, tried to hold to a narrower narrative - that he saw Walla as an opportunity to create a friendlier outlet on the Right; that interventions were relatively rare and often reactive; and that the prosecution was “stretching” routine contacts into something they were not.