On August 4, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed by TIME reporter Eric Cortellessa. Five days later, he published an article fact-checking Netanyahu’s statements, making claims that the Prime Minister’s Office later called “false.”
In his fact-checking, Cortellessa found that some of the responses “lacked context, were not supported by facts, or were not true.”
The PMO directly denied this, stating: “Everything Prime Minister Netanyahu said was true, and Eric Cortellessa misled the readers of TIME magazine.”
The first comment the PMO criticized was Qatar’s funding of Hamas. During the first interview, Netanyahu said that permission to allow Qatar to fund Hamas existed before he took office.
Cortellessa said during the fact-check: “It was only in 2014 that the Israeli government, with Netanyahu’s consent, was directly involved in Qatari financial transfers.”
Qatar funds in the spotlight
The PMO responded that the funding was first approved in 2007, shortly after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, and that it had been continued by all governments since then, including Netanyahu and the Bennett-Lapid government.
In the original interview, Netanyahu defended the funding, saying an even bigger factor was the smuggling of weapons and ammunition from the Sinai Peninsula.
Citing a former CIA analyst, Cortellessa said the Qatari money was actually the more important factor. The PMO said Egyptian lax border surveillance contributed to the arrival of weapons from Sinai into Gaza.
The PMO then presented an analysis showing that Qatari funds were under tight control and monitored by external institutions such as the European Union and the United States. The office pointed out that there was no reason to give the former analyst’s assessment more weight than that of Netanyahu or the intelligence services.
Cortellessa referred to an allegedly well-known quote from Netanyahu in which he said: “Anyone who wants to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state must support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of funds to Hamas.”
The PMO claimed that this was not evidence that Netanyahu had called on the population to support Hamas.
The PMO also contradicted Cortellessa’s claim that Netanyahu was not really in charge. Netanyahu told him of his control over the coalition government: “I run the show, I make the decisions. I formulate the policy.”
Cortellessa claimed that Netanyahu is beholden to his ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and cannot pursue independent policies without them, citing the government’s majority of four seats compared to the total number of seats held by Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party) and Ben-Gvir (Otzmah Yehudit) (13).
The PMO claimed that this was not the case and that the majority of ministers voted in line with the government.
