On August 4, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed by TIME reporter Eric Cortellessa. Five days later, he published an article fact-checking Netanyahu, in which he made claims that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) subsequently said were “incorrect.”
Cortellessa asserted in his fact-checking that some responses “lacked context, were not supported by facts, or were not true.”
The PMO directly disputed this and said, “Everything Prime Minister Netanyahu said was true, and Eric Cortellessa misled TIME readers.”
The first comment that the PMO took issue with was on the Qatari funding of Hamas. During the initial interview, Netanyahu said that allowing Qatar to fund Hamas had been in place before he took office.
Cortellessa, during fact-checking, said, “Only in 2014, under the approval of Netanyahu, did the Israeli government become directly involved in Qatari financial transfers.”
Qatari funds under the spotlight
The PMO responded by saying that funding had been permitted first in 2007, shortly after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, and had been continued by every government since, including Netanyahu’s and the Bennett-Lapid government.
In the original interview, Netanyahu defended the funding, saying that a bigger factor was the smuggling of weapons and ammunition from the Sinai peninsula.
Citing a former CIA analyst, Cortellessa said that the Qatari money had actually been the more important factor. The PMO said that the lackadaisical policing of the border by the Egyptians had contributed to the smuggling of weapons into Gaza from Sinai.
The PMO then took to providing an analysis that showed that the Qatari funds were under strict 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 more weight to the former analyst’s assessment than Netanyahu’s or the intelligence agencies.
Cortellessa referenced a supposedly well-known quote attributed to Netanyahu in which he said, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.”
The PMO claimed that this was not evidence that Netanyahu called for people to support Hamas.
The PMO also took issue with Cortellessa’s claim that Netanyahu was not truly in charge. Netanyahu told him regarding his control of the coalition government, “I run the show, I make the decisions. I formulate the policy.”
Cortellessa asserted that Netanyahu was beholden to ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and that he was unable to engage in independent policy without them, citing the government’s four-seat majority against the total number of seats held by Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party) and Ben-Gvir (Otzma Yehudit), 13.
The PMO asserted that this was not the case and that the majority of ministers voted consistently with the government.