A stormy hearing erupted Monday at the Jerusalem District Court in the Netanyahu corruption trial, with the prime minister's lead defense attorney threatening to resign over a court order accelerating the proceedings to five hearing days per week, in what the defense called an impossible and unjust schedule.
Attorney Amit Hadad, appearing alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, delivered a blistering attack on the court's timeline, comparing the pressure being placed on the defense team to a form of professional imprisonment. "When someone asks to resign, the lockdown is forever, there is no horizon for release," Hadad said. "We will not participate in the theater of a trial."
Hadad invoked the Eichmann trial, the landmark 1961 case, as the only historical precedent for a five-day-per-week hearing schedule in Israeli legal history. "Only in the Eichmann trial were there five hearing days a week," he said, framing the court's demand as extraordinary and unprecedented outside of that singular historical context.
The defense attorney warned that the schedule, formalized in a decision issued last Thursday, would make proper preparation physically and professionally impossible. "This will require us to work on Shabbat, and even if we work on Shabbat we won't manage. We will have to work on every holiday. There will be an enormous, exceptional miscarriage of justice. We will not be able to prepare a single witness." He added that his team has personal lives, offices, and other clients, and that for the past year it has been impossible to sit with the prime minister and prepare the defense case.
Hadad also flatly contradicted the court's premise that accelerating hearings would meaningfully shorten the trial. "There is no chance this trial ends before March 2028, not September as estimated. This is a massive, wide-ranging case. The indictment makes clear there is no claim against us."
Netanyahu himself addressed the judges directly, confirming that Hadad had called him to say the team had "no possibility of giving you the defense you deserve" and had sought to resign. The prime minister drew comparisons to other high-profile cases, noting that organized crime family trials were held once a week and the submarines case twice a week. "There is an enormous miscarriage of justice here," he said, adding accusations that witnesses had been intimidated, families destroyed, and evidence concealed.
In a notable development, the lead prosecutor, attorney Yehudit Tirosh, sided with the defense on the scheduling question, telling the court that five days "is something very difficult, to the point of impossible, for both prosecution and defense teams," and noting that the defendant had almost never even attended four full hearing days per week as previously scheduled.
