JERUSALEM (VINnews) — The panel of judges overseeing the corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Monday their suggestion from 2023 that the prosecution drop the bribery charge against the premier, as it will be difficult to prove and will therefore drag out the proceedings.

The judges made the same recommendation exactly three years ago for the same reason, but the prosecution declined to drop the charge. The court has since heard extensive testimony from Netanyahu on the allegations, none of which changed the recommendation. On Monday, the judges told the court that their recommendation from June 2023 “remains unchanged.”

During the hearing in the Jerusalem District Court on Monday about expanding sessions to five days a week in the long-running trial, chief defense attorney Amit Hadad stressed that keeping the bribery charge on the docket would draw out the trial.

“If the bribery charge remains, we’ll have hundreds of witnesses here. There’s no chance we would finish by March 2028,” he said, according to Hebrew media reports.

Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman, one of the three judges on the panel hearing Netanyahu’s case, is slated for mandatory retirement in March 2028. All judges in Israel are forced to retire when they turn 70 years old.

Netanyahu said that his defense team “won’t give up on a single defense witness. They’re coming with baseless claims and we will refute them,” according to Channel 12.

Netanyahu faces a bribery charge in only one of three cases against him, Case 4000, in which he is also accused of fraud and breach of trust in connection with the relations between the Bezeq telecom firm and the Communications Ministry under Netanyahu.

Known as the Bezeq-Walla case, Case 4000 focuses on allegations that Netanyahu authorized regulatory decisions that financially benefited Bezeq telecommunications giant shareholder Shaul Elovitch to the tune of hundreds of millions of shekels. In return, Netanyahu allegedly received favorable media coverage from the Walla news site owned by Elovitch.

Netanyahu is also on trial for two additional counts of fraud and breach of trust in Case 1000, which concerns gifts he allegedly inappropriately received from billionaire benefactors, and in Case 2000, in which he allegedly negotiated to obtain positive media coverage in a newspaper in exchange for curtailing its competitors.

He denies all wrongdoing in each case and claims, without evidence, that the charges were fabricated in an effort to remove him from power. Netanyahu’s supporters claim that one of the reasons the prosecution is insisting on bribery charges is because they carry with them moral turpitude (even in cases of suspended sentences) and this would disqualify Netanyahu from public office for seven years, whereas the fraud and breach of trust charges do not automatically carry a designation of moral turpitude.