Marrakech – Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is facing a new lawsuit accusing her of subjecting a longtime household worker to years of abuse and of degrading him with an anti-Moroccan slur.
Rami Ben Hamo, who worked for the Prime Minister’s Office and the official residence for more than a decade, filed the claim Tuesday with the Jerusalem Regional Labor Court.
He is seeking NIS 450,000, about $150,000, in compensation – 400,000 of it for nonfinancial harm, workplace abuse, breach of good faith, and emotional distress, and the remaining 50,000 for alleged violations of Israel’s labor law.
According to the filing, Ben Hamo was employed directly as a household worker from March 2023 until December 2025. Throughout that period, he alleges, he endured “extreme abuse” from the premier’s wife on a daily basis while working hours that breached Israeli law.
The most degrading moment, he claims, came over a task as small as folding plastic bags. When he failed to fold one the way she wanted, Ben Hamo alleges that Sara Netanyahu told him, “Come, I’ll teach you how to fold bags,” then added, “My children fold better than you,” and “You’re a backward Moroccan.” Other outlets rendered the insult as “unsophisticated” or “underdeveloped” Moroccan.
Ben Hamo says the reference to his Moroccan origin wounded him deeply and was repeated more than once. At times, according to the suit, he cried and begged her to stop.
‘A slave, not an employee’
The lawsuit describes daily humiliation over ordinary chores. Ben Hamo alleges he was ordered to clean her personal bag and wipe the soles of her shoes, and to wash his hands upon entering the house and between tasks, sometimes more than ten times a day. When he forgot, he claims, she answered with shouting and insults such as “You don’t know how to clean,” “You clean badly,” and “Why aren’t the baseboards clean?”
His days began around 7:30 a.m. and sometimes stretched into the middle of the night, the filing states. He alleges he worked 60 to 80 overtime hours a month. He also claims he was kept on the job after the start of Shabbat, though Sara Netanyahu knew he was observant, and was once summoned to the Balfour residence on a Saturday night to wash dishes.
The alleged mistreatment did not ease when his health failed. Ben Hamo says he suffered a cardiac event during a workday in February 2025 and underwent a catheterization at Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital. Rather than relent, he claims, Sara Netanyahu grew harsher, telling him, “Come on, let them find me someone else instead of you,” along with “You’re blind” and “Nothing is ever clean.”
He alleges that he repeatedly asked to transfer to the Prime Minister’s Office, only to be told to “buy time” and “hold on” because no replacement was available.
One of the final incidents, according to the suit, saw Sara Netanyahu throw a cabinet’s worth of plastic bags to the floor and leave him crawling to collect them before she slammed a bottle of tonic water down in anger. When the prime minister arrived, she allegedly told him that Ben Hamo had wished her dead. Ben Hamo says he had actually pleaded, “May God take me away from this job already,” and that Netanyahu then ordered him out of the house.
Ben Hamo says he began the job with “great reverence and endless respect” for the couple, but came to feel “he was being treated like a slave rather than an employee.” He also alleges that acting director-general Drorit Steinmetz refused to let him record that he was leaving because of Sara Netanyahu’s conduct, and instructed him to cite “personal reasons.”
The prime minister’s office rejected the allegations as “fake news and a continuation of the witch-hunt against the prime minister, his wife and his family which always intensifies during election campaigns.” The claims have not been adjudicated.
Not the first Moroccan to be shamed
For Moroccans, the insult is no isolated slip. It lays bare a contempt the country’s Ashkenazi elite – the Netanyahus among them – has long directed at the Jews it deemed beneath it. Mizrahim were cast as the working class, the cleaners and the cooks, while the ruling families traced their pedigree to Central Europe.
His suit follows a separate claim filed last month by Yehiel Ohev-Ami, a 61-year-old who was fired from his cooking and cleaning job, seeking NIS 300,000 ($98,000). Ohev-Ami alleges that Sara Netanyahu shoved him against a wall three times while shouting, “Who’s stupid?” and “Who’s retarded?”, and told him, “I hope you get cancer,” after he returned from a smoking break.
He also claims she “diagnosed” him with autism, declared herself “the number one psychologist in Israel,” and then demanded three paychecks in payment, an insult sharpened by the fact that his own son is autistic. Sara Netanyahu is an educational psychologist by profession.
The pattern goes back several years. In 2017, former caretaker Menny Naftali won NIS 170,000 ($43,735) after a court found he had suffered verbal and emotional abuse.
In May, an employment agency quietly paid a cafeteria worker known only as “Shin,” who alleged that Sara Netanyahu pelted her with tomatoes and olives over a salad. Further suits, from a French immigrant in 2020 and cleaner Sylvie Genesia, have followed, alongside accusations dating to 1996, when Netanyahu fired a nanny for “burning the soup.”
The anti-Moroccan strain is not confined to the residence. In March, Netanyahu’s spokesman and acting chief of staff, Ziv Agmon, resigned after leaked recordings caught him calling Likud lawmaker Eli Revivo a “retarded Moroccan” and another lawmaker a “baboon.”
Agmon conceded the quotes were real but claimed they were taken out of context. Opposition leader Yair Lapid charged that Netanyahu “has once again proven that the biggest racists in the country are in the Prime Minister’s Office.”
The timing sharpens the stakes. Israel heads to a general election in October, and Netanyahu’s main challenger, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, comes from a Moroccan-Jewish background. Mizrahi voters, long courted by Netanyahu’s Likud, may prove decisive, and polls suggest Eisenkot is making inroads with them.
