The panel of three judges in the Jerusalem District Court will debate on Tuesday the request of opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense attorneys to postpone the testimony of state witness Nir Hefetz, which was scheduled for Tuesday morning. Netanyahu’s defense team has asked to postpone the upcoming testimony in light of recent testimony by the prosecution witness in Case 1000 Hadas Klein, who was the personal assistant of Israeli-American tycoon Arnon Milchan.
Case 1000, a.k.a. as the Gifts Affair, is a criminal investigation into the relationship between former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and businessmen James Packer and Arnon Milchan.
Klein provided the State Attorney’s Office with information regarding gifts purchased by Milchan and Packer to Sara Netanyahu. Milchan himself was questioned following her revelations. The prosecution has told the court that although the completion of the investigation in Case 1000 had no direct connection to Nir Hefetz’s testimony, it would not oppose a delay.
A source familiar with the details of the investigation told Haaretz that in the testimony Klein gave the police on October 24, she said that Milchan and Packer gifted Sara Netanyahu with three bracelets. One of them, worth about $45,000, was purchased by Packer. According to Klein, the jewelry—along with the bags—were given at Sara Netanyahu’s request, for a personal event.
When Klein was asked why she had not provided the information earlier, she explained that her lawyer at the time, Boaz Ben-Zur, now Netanyahu’s defense attorney, instructed her to answer only direct questions from investigators and not to volunteer information of her own free will. According to her, as the hearings in the trial progressed, she recalled these details.
Hefetz, a media expert, who was an associate and the communications adviser to the Netanyahu family, signed a state witness agreement after his police interrogation. Hefetz had been under relentless pressure by his interrogators to flip. Among other things, he was threatened that his family would be broken, because the police would allegedly release intimate details of his extramarital affair.
Hefetz said during the refresher session ahead of his testimony that billionaire Shaul Elovitch, who owned the majority shares in the communications giant Bezeq as well as the news website Walla, told him that if he were asked in the future why he used to meet with him so often, he should say that the meetings dealt with attempts to sell the Walla website. The prosecution claims that those frequent meetings were about Elovitch’s directives for favorable coverage for Netanyahu and his family – allegedly in exchange for favorable legislation regarding Bezeq.
