The judges accepted the request of the prime minister's lawyers and ruled that the next hearing will take place in mid-January. • Netanyahu's lawyers demand amendments to the indictment
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu // Photo: Dudi Vaknin
The court decided today (Tuesday) to postpone the opening of the evidentiary phase in the trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the month of February.
The decision was preceded by a request from the defense teams of all the defendants to amend the indictments.
The court decided to extend Netanyahu's response to the indictment from Sunday, January 13.
The prime minister's attorneys are demanding that the indictment be corrected, including bringing evidence against the law, and including the prime minister's family members and himself as a single legal entity.
Netanyahu's lawyers, Boaz Ben Tzur and Amit Hadad, claim in the application that, "according to the law, there is a sharp and clear prohibition on bringing evidence in the indictment, and yet the indictment includes plenty of evidence."
According to the attorneys, "the inclusion in the indictment of improper details stems from an improper move by the accuser in conducting the proceedings, which is based, among other things, on a flawed and biased investigative procedure."
Prosecutors also claim that "the indictment invented a new legal entity called 'Netanyahu and his family' or 'Netanyahu and his wife'. The indictment treats the prime minister and his family as if it were one person. "And certainly it is not possible to create a legal entity called 'Netanyahu and his family' for that purpose."
Another argument of attorneys Ben Tzur and Hadad is that the indictment does not include a full and exhaustive list of the gifts that Netanyahu allegedly received.
"The indictment lacks sufficient factual detail, including the dates on which the gifts were received, the identity of the giver of the gifts, the identity of the recipient of the gifts and the identity of the applicant or initiator of the gifts," the attorneys write in the application.
"It is not possible to accept a situation where an indictment for a bribery offense does not include a detail of the alleged death that was given."
The attorneys conclude that, "the systematic manner in which the wording of the indictment, leads to the conclusion that these are defects that fell into the indictment inadvertently."
