Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot revealed that while he was serving as IDF chief of staff, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him urgently to his residence, where he asked him to have military personnel in a specific sector in the Golan Heights enter into underground bunkers.

Eisenkot, whose Yashar party has pulled ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud in several recent polls, said in a television interview aired Wednesday that only after looking into the issue did he understand that one of Netanyahu’s sons was serving in the Israel Defense Forces in that sector and that this was the reason for the request.

Eisenkot was chief of staff from 2015 to 2019, and Netanyahu’s son Avner served in a battlefield intelligence gathering unit in the IDF from 2014 to 2017.

“This seemed like a strange demand to me,” Eisenkot told Channel 12 news, adding that he told Netanyahu, “There is a constant risk to civilians, to soldiers, but it is not the right thing to do.”

The former chief of staff said when Netanyahu tried to insist on the request, he understood there was “some family issue that was stressing him,” and that “there’s something completely crazy happening around him.”

He said, however, that he refused the request, to the prime minister’s displeasure, as Netanyahu’s concerns were not grounded.

Eisenkot said the incident sheds light on current events in which Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, called the head of the Shin Bet, David Zini, to request lifetime security protection for........

© The Times of Israel