Former hostage Eli Sharabi warned against the violent discourse of elected officials targeting leading legal figures, and said that politicians would be responsible if a member of the public were to “take the law into their own hands.”

“I think we have a leadership that uses violent discourse,” Sharabi said in the Channel 12 interview broadcast Saturday, clarifying that he was referring to elected officials.

“I think they forget for a moment that people are looking to them, listening to them, and that their words can be very, very problematic — toward the attorney general, the president of the Supreme Court,” he said.

“These are things that have not been said before, these are terrible things,” he said, referring to recent attacks on legal officials, often referred to as gatekeepers of democracy.

Last week, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich vowed to “trample” Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and called him a “violent megalomaniac.” Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara is a frequent target of members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government, which has been trying unsuccessfully for months to fire her.

Sharabi, who has been speaking about his experiences around the world, and wrote a book about his time in captivity, said that he........

© The Times of Israel