Former Israel Defense Forces Spokesman Brig. Gen. (ret.) Avi Benayahu will be questioned under warning on suspicion of breach of trust over the Harpaz affair, Channel 1 reported on Saturday. According to the report, "Benayahu used the media in an illegitimate manner against the political echelon," and former IDF chief of general staff Gabi Ashkenazi's bureau worked in close conjunction with journalists.
The affair broke in 2010 when a document surfaced that was falsely attributed to Yoav Galant, the leading candidate to succeed Ashkenazi as IDF chief of staff. The document was soon discredited as a forgery, and a family friend of Ashkenazi and his wife Ronit's, Boaz Harpaz, was implicated as having composed the fake document in an effort to keep Galant from being appointed. The ensuing scandal exposed the deep inter-office animosity between Ashkenazi and then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
The Channel 1 report said that at a meeting last Thursday at Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein's office, which preceded the decision to conduct a criminal investigation into the affair, it became apparent that Ashkenazi's involvement with the Harpaz document was much greater than initially thought.
A senior law enforcement official told Israel Hayom over the weekend that "the new material gathered by the IDF Military Police during the investigation and recordings in which Ashkenazi's voice can be heard were ultimately deciding factors that went into the decision to order a criminal investigation."
The head of the police's Investigation and Intelligence Department, Maj. Gen. Manny Yitzhak, is expected to decide Sunday which unit will investigate Ashkenazi, his then-assistant Erez Weiner, and other senior officials under warning. The job will most likely be assigned to the International Crime Investigations Unit, which investigated the Galant document, or to the National Anti-Fraud Unit, because Ashkenazi is now considered a public figure.
A senior police official said on Saturday that the investigators will likely be asked to take testimony from former Defense Minister Ehud Barak's associates, and possibly from Barak himself, as well as from journalists who were allegedly "handled" by Ashkenazi during the affair.
The police emphasized on Saturday that the matter was not a continuation of a previous investigation, but the beginning of a new one, based on new evidence.
A Justice Ministry spokesperson said over the weekend that a gag order was issued by the chief justice of the Military Court's special tribunals unit over all the material involved in the Harpaz affair, and that all stages of the investigation are to be conducted in secrecy.