Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s testimony in his long-running trial came to an end on Wednesday after 98 hearings over the past year and a half. The trial will now continue without his presence.

Following the end of the hearing, Netanyahu addressed the judges and delivered a scathing speech in which he sharply attacked the years-long witch hunt waged against him by the law enforcement system.

“I am finishing after ten years of hell…there is no other word for it,” Netanyahu said. “Ten years in which they sent people to the Philippines to investigate a housekeeper we had, sent people to the United States, Europe, Australia, turned the whole world upside down. It required an enormous team and vast sums of money. The goal was one thing—to comb through everything with an iron rake and find something, just ANYTHING, and they found nothing. They found nothing. Nothing like this has ever happened. I do not know of such a massive effort anywhere in the free world. What was supposed to be law enforcement became, let’s call it, a perversion of law. A tremendous effort to frame someone.”

“There are individual rights, rights of the person being investigated. I have stood here time after time, in addition to these endless investigations. All my associates, my family, huge circles of people, almost everyone who worked with me—they brought them in for questioning, warned them, interrogated them under caution, used investigative methods that are impossible to believe. I heard what they did to Hefetz—it was the Stasi! They destroyed families, many families, not only mine. Dozens of families. This insane race to find something—ANYTHING. ‘Give us something on Netanyahu.’ They were not looking for a crime; they were looking for a person!

“Because they found nothing. Nothing at all. They found no envelopes of cash, no regulatory favors—we did the exact opposite. They tried to manufacture an offense. They created an offense. Not only that—I am speaking to the judges—they turned things upside down. They did it because there was nothing with Bezeq. What could they do? There was nothing there. They moved from control of a media outlet to favorable coverage, then to meetings, then to unusual responsiveness. These are constructions.

Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman: ‘All right…’

Netanyahu: ‘It is not all right! This cannot happen in a democracy. They take this spyware, put it on dozens and hundreds of people. We are not a police state! It is hidden away in Har Hotzvim. No one touches it. They put fences around the law enforcement system so nobody will discover what happened here. They cut off Filber’s electricity. They grabbed Avi Harrow and told him, ‘We’ll break you,’ and they broke him. There was no limit to what they did in their search for an offense.

“This is not only about me. It is about an attempt to interfere. A direct and deliberate effort through political coverage to prevent Israeli citizens from choosing whom they want, timed with political developments. Nothing like this has ever happened.

“I will finish, Your Honor, after ten years of hell. There is no other word for it. I am trying to lead this country through extraordinary challenges, among the greatest faced by any nation today, and then to see this thing… this vile, false, malicious thing aimed not only at harming individual rights but at harming the rights of the entire public.

“I must say what I am seeking. You cannot return the ten years. Not to me, not to the dozens of familes that were harmed and are still being harmed.

“What I seek is to finish this. As much as possible. It was all done in such a transparent and distorted way. Those years cannot be returned. I want to tell the truth. The decision is in your hands—to bring the truth to the public. The truth, and only justice.”

The cases against Netanyahu fell apart one by one in the courtroom. Case 4000, the most serious of the charges against Netanyahu due to its bribery allegations, has essentially been debunked. The judges overseeing the case recommended years ago that the bribery charges be dropped.

In addition, numerous violations of the law on the part of the police and state prosecutors were revealed during the trial, including the illegal use of spyware, investigative actions carried out without the approval of the Attorney General and without being disclosed to the defense, and brutal and illegal interrogation tactics used against state witnesses in the case, all former aides of Netanyahu.

Retired police commander Lt. Col. (res.) Tzachi Habkin, a former Lahav 433 investigator and member of the teams that handled Netanyahu’s cases, testified during the trial that the highest-ranking police investigators assigned to the cases forged, lied, tampered with evidence, perjured themselves, and committed a long list of extremely serious criminal offenses. He also testified that then-Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit authorized only one specific investigative action, but the police investigators expanded the investigation on their own–without legal approval. In addition, a senior police officer (with the rank of Assistant Commissioner) who led the investigations against Netanyahu instructed investigators to obstruct the investigation.

Channel 14 journalist Yinon Magal provided a transcript of parts of Habkin’s testimony on Case 4000, entitled “The Comedy Of The Netanyahu Trial.”

Investigator Habkin admits: “We didn’t investigate ‘irregular responsiveness’–I don’t even know what that is.”

Netanyahu’s lawyer. Adv. Amit Hadad: Confirm for me that the basis of the case was that Netanyahu received favorable coverage from the Walla news site.

Habkin: Yes, we investigated favorable coverage.

Hadad: Only favorable coverage?

Habkin: Yes.

Hadad: And did you investigate “irregular responsiveness”?

Habkin: What is ‘irregular responsiveness’?

Hadad: You never investigated irregular responsiveness?

Habkin: I don’t know what that is. Irregular responsiveness has to be measured against something.

Hadad: Confirm for me that you never investigated and never attempted to establish a basis of comparison–not against other channels, not against other politicians?

Habkin: Never.

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)