The members of Israel’s Ministerial Defense Committee have signed a secrecy pledge at the demand of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, following leaks from the committee’s deliberations.
Netanyahu and Attorney General Michael Ben- Yair this week threatened the 11- member panel that they would launch legal inquiries the next time information from the meetings was leaked to the public.
Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres extracted a similar secrecy pledge from his ministers in an effort to plug up leaks.
The committee, or “Inner Cabinet,” meets at least once each week.
The premier’s wrath was apparently triggered by reports from the Sept. 18 meeting of a “rebellion” by hard-line ministers over Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai’s scheduled session later that day with Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat.
Cabinet members Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan, Ze’ev “Benny” Begin and others complained that Arafat would learn about the Israeli proposal for the redeployment of its troops in the West Bank town of Hebron before the Inner Cabinet did.
They demanded that the proposal be fully discussed in the Inner Cabinet before the Mordechai-Arafat meeting.
But Netanyahu declined either to open the proposal for discussion or to postpone the meeting with Arafat.
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