Moshe Ya'alon
Moshe Ya'alonFlash 90

Former Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon lashed out at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in an interview with Channel 10 Thursday night and accused the Prime Minister of corruption over the so-called 'submarine affair'. Investigators have said that Netanyahu is not a suspect.

Ya'alon said that "it is inconceivable that he was not involved" in the alleged scandal and called for his resignation. "I do not know if the police will succeed in bringing a criminal indictment, and it does not really matter to me," he added.

"What I have experienced on this subject makes me say very clearly: The prime minister is corrupt, and I say this not only on the 3000 affair [regarding the purchase of German-made submarines]. I am surprised that they did not call him to testify," said the former defense minister.

"The big explosion began when I realized that the prime minister was going to Germany to sign a deal for three additional submarines and two anti-submarine warships with the chancellor," he said. "In the end, it ended with the fact that I was told that during the visit to Germany he did not sign this memorandum of understanding, but that the German government would give them to us if we needed them in the future."

The Likud said in response to Ya'alon's statement: "Bogey's unreliability was already proven when the law enforcement authorities said that his statements were inconsistent with reality and called them 'baseless.' Ya'alon called his relationship with Netanyahu 'excellent' and said that he was an excellent prime minister, until he was forced to leave the Defense Ministry."

"He left not because of his his nonsense about the submarines, but because it was the condition of Yisrael Beytenu to join the coalition and expand it. Ya'alon will look for other ways to reach the electoral threshold. In the meantime, this way [of denigrating Netanyahu] has not proven itself," the Likud added.

All recent polls predict that Ya'alon's intended political party would not cross the minimum election threshold.