Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal trial has been postponed again, after the Jerusalem District Court on Sunday canceled his scheduled testimony for Monday through Wednesday of this week at his request.
Under the court’s decision, defense attorney Amit Hadad must file a detailed update by Thursday on whether circumstances have changed enough to allow Netanyahu’s testimony to resume next week, while the defense is expected to produce alternate witnesses for the canceled dates.
That leaves the case in a familiar position: paused, but not reset. The proceedings had already been effectively frozen for roughly a month and a half amid wartime disruption, after the court system shifted into emergency mode during the fighting with Iran. Only days ago, Netanyahu’s trial was expected to resume its regular schedule, before the defense sought an additional postponement, citing classified security and diplomatic reasons.
In legal terms, the trial remains deep in the testimony phase of Cases 1000, 2000, and 4000 - the gifts affair, the Yediot Aharonot-Israel Hayom conversations, and the Bezeq-Walla case, respectively. Of those, Case 4000 remains the most serious because it includes the bribery charge, and it is also the case that has dominated the most recent stretch of Netanyahu’s testimony.
What is supposed to resume next week, if the court allows it, is not just another round of hearings but the continuation of Netanyahu’s cross-examination by the prosecution; that is the real significance of this stage.
For months, Netanyahu used direct testimony to present his own broad account of the case: that he was targeted by hostile investigators and media, that former aides turned against him under pressure, and that ordinary political and media conduct was retroactively recast as criminal.
The prosecution’s task in cross-examination is the opposite - to force that sweeping narrative back into the state’s chronology, documents, meetings, messages, and alleged contradictions.
Cross-examination best opportunity to directly challenge Netanyahu
That is also why this phase matters more than the latest scheduling fight. The prosecution has long viewed cross-examination as its best opportunity to challenge Netanyahu directly on the central issue in Case 4000: whether he was personally involved in an alleged quid pro quo in which regulatory benefits for Shaul Elovitch’s business interests were tied to favorable coverage on Walla, or whether key aides acted independently, as Netanyahu insists.
The month before the current pause had already brought that clash into sharper focus. The questioning was centered largely on Case 4000, including Netanyahu’s dealings with Elovitch, the regulatory decisions surrounding the Bezeq-Yes merger, and the alleged “directive meeting” with former Communications Ministry director-general Shlomo Filber - a meeting Netanyahu denies took place.
More broadly, the prosecution was trying to pin Netanyahu down on whether he personally directed or knew about steps that witnesses such as Filber and Nir Hefetz described in detail, while the defense was trying to preserve the impression left by his direct testimony: that the case is inflated, politicized, and built on compromised insiders with motives of their own.
Seen over the longer term, the case has become one of the defining legal and political sagas of Netanyahu’s era. The trial began in 2020 following his 2019 indictment, continued while he was briefly out of office, and has stretched through his return to the premiership.
Over five years, it has moved through prosecution witnesses, lengthy procedural delays, Netanyahu’s own testimony beginning in December 2024, and now repeated interruptions due to the war and national security developments.
That prolonged timeline is part of the story in itself. The latest pause does not alter the substance of the charges, but repeated delays do have practical consequences: they lengthen an already years-long proceeding, break the momentum of testimony, and postpone a politically explosive cross-examination that both sides understand could be more revealing than Netanyahu’s carefully managed direct examination.
Surrounding all of this is a parallel political campaign to stop the trial altogether. Coalition figures have repeatedly called for steps that would end, suspend, or neutralize the proceedings, and US President Donald Trump also publicly called for the trial to be canceled or for Netanyahu to receive a pardon. Those calls are not part of the legal process, but they have become part of the broader political atmosphere in which the trial now unfolds.
So the immediate question is procedural, but the underlying one is far bigger. On Thursday, Hadad is due to update the court on whether Netanyahu can return to the stand next week. If he does, the trial will move back into the phase that may matter most: not Netanyahu telling his story on his own terms, but prosecutors testing it line by line.
If he does not, the case will remain where it has so often been in recent years - active in theory, delayed in practice, and still waiting for its most consequential confrontation to fully play out.