The Ramle Court ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hand over to the court his updated medical records, including documents certifying the timing of his prostate cancer diagnosis recently made public. On April 24, Netanyahu, delivering the annual medical report on the prime minister’s health, revealed that he had been cured of early prostate cancer thanks to radiotherapy.
The judge’s order comes as part of the hearings of the defamation lawsuit filed by Netanyahu in June 2024 against the activist Gonen Ben Yitzhak and the journalists Uri Misgav of Haaretz and Ben Caspit of Maariv, accused by the prime minister of having insinuated that Netanyahu was suffering from pancreatic cancer. In March 2025 – again in the context of the defamation case – the same judge had already viewed Netanyahu’s medical records, stating that it did not reveal that Netanyahu was “suffering from pancreatic cancer or another health problem not made known to the public”.
On April 24, revealing his illness, Netanyahu said he had asked to postpone the publication of the medical report by two months “to prevent the Iranian regime from spreading further false propaganda against Israel in times of war.”
However, on the same day, Professor Aron Popovtzer, the director of the Institute of Oncology at Hadassah Hospital who treated Netanyahu, stated that radiotherapy had started about two and a half months earlier, i.e. before the start of the war, and that the disease had been diagnosed “a few months earlier”.
«The prime minister hid from the public that he is suffering from cancer, in times of war. He and his doctors lied,” journalist Uri Misgav wrote the day Netanyahu revealed he had prostate cancer. The Ramle judge also today rejected the request of two of the defendants to call the prime minister’s doctors to testify, specifying that a decision on the matter will be made after the delivery of the updated medical records and after the testimony of the appellant Netanyahu.