Benjamin Netanyahu’s son has been seen hiding out – and draft dodging amid the Israeli military’s bloody campaign in Gaza – in an expensive rented apartment in a high-rise building in Florida.
In a report on Thursday, Britain’s Daily Mail published photos of Yair Netanyahu, 32, lounging in a luxury apartment rented for $5,000 a month in Hallandale Beach outside Miami.
The newspaper said Netanyahu’s son is qualified to serve in the military as a reservist until he is 40. Yet, he has opted to stay 7,000 miles away from the frontline.
Yair (pictured below) is guarded round-the-clock by two armed Israeli agents of Shin Bet. “They accompany him to the gym, pool and whenever he leaves the swank high rise,” the Mail quoted close sources as saying.
His father has called upon a record number of reservists to join the military in its hostilities in the besieged Gaza Strip. Now the son has attracted fierce criticism for not returning to the occupied territories.
“But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s older son Yair looks in no hurry to join their ranks as he’s seen loafing around a luxury Florida condo complex,” said the report.
The newspaper quoted Uri Misgav, a journalist for Israel’s Haaretz and a long-time Netanyahu critic, as saying, “He likes to wage war, but via social media.”
“He is the lazy bum son who is partying in Miami while his prime minister father urges ordinary Israelis to sacrifice their own sons and lives.”
Reservists who abandoned studies, jobs and vacations in the States to race back to Israel similarly grilled Yair.
Yair spent much of 2023 in the US and had been looking to obtain residency before October 7 – the date the regime was caught off-guard in Operation Al-Aqsa Storm conducted by the Palestinian resistance fighters.
Yair has blamed the judiciary and military for the October attacks in a series of posts on his Telegram account. He finally bowed to public pressure and flew back to Tel Aviv late November, where he was photographed manning phones for an NGO ambulance service.
But he was already back in the US by mid-January.
The Israeli onslaught on Gaza is in its fifth month now. Netanyahu remains defiant in the face of international warnings, pushing for a ground invasion into Gaza’s most populated city, Rafah.
Israel has killed more than 28,600 people, most of them women and children, in Gaza since that October day.
