JERUSALEM — No sooner had the Israeli military excavators begun to drill into the rocky ground than the suspicions burst forth.

They were not directed so much at Hezbollah, Israel’s archenemy to the north: Few Israelis were completely surprised at their government’s assertion that the group had dug tunnels under the Lebanese border. Residents there have complained of strange sounds at night for years.

Instead, the distrust was directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who recently assumed the additional role of defense minister, and who is facing increasing legal woes. The military operation to expose and destroy what his government described as tunnels into Israeli territory began two days after the Israeli police recommended that Mr. Netanyahu be indicted on bribery, fraud and other charges — the third corruption case against him and potentially the most damaging.

At the same time, Mr. Netanyahu is trying to preserve his fragile coalition amid accusations that he has not been tough enough in handling the simmering conflict with Gaza to the south. He and his political opponents are now in an election year.

On television, radio and social networks, many Israelis wondered if the tunnels disclosure was a cynical ploy akin to the 1997 black comedy “Wag the Dog,” in which a political candidate invents a war to distract from his personal predicament. While Mr. Netanyahu hasn’t exactly done that, critics said he appeared to be pumping the serendipitous military action against the tunnels for all it was worth.

More than the tunnels, the operation has exposed the extent of Mr. Netanyahu’s problematic situation — a potentially noxious mix of national security and personal and political expediency that risks damage to Israeli public confidence.

“In legal terms, there is nothing to prevent Netanyahu continuing in office,” said Shlomo Avineri, a professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “But there’s also a question of the public standing of a prime minister and minister of defense under investigation. There have been prime ministers who have resigned for much less.”

While acknowledging the importance of destroying tunnels, detractors immediately ascribed dubious political motives to the timing of the action and decried the drumbeating and media hype of what they said was basically a defensive engineering project on Israeli soil. They said even the name of the maneuver, Operation Northern Shield, seemed overly alarming and reminiscent of past wars.

“This operation was necessary. We have to tell the truth,” Tzipi Livni, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, said on radio on Tuesday morning. “But from here to these dramas is a long way off.”

Speaking to international journalists a few hours later, Ms. Livni was more circumspect, saying nobody had invented the tunnels as a political fiction and refraining from any criticism.

Yoav Gallant, the minister of construction and housing and a retired general, criticized the claims of political opportunism.

“We shouldn’t take the process of protecting Israel’s security and turn it into a political tool,” he said in Parliament on Monday. “Such behavior is worthless. A little modesty, a bit of courtesy, and some respect for the government of Israel and the cabinet, and less rage and shouting about the wrong things,” he added.

Mr. Netanyahu addressed the nation on Monday night in what many saw as a superfluous live broadcast from the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, alongside the outgoing military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot. General Eisenkot emphasized that the cabinet had approved the anti-tunnel operation nearly a month ago.

The army distributed unusually voluminous amounts of information including aerial images and footage of what the army said was a Hezbollah operative fleeing from a booby-trapped camera inside one of the tunnels.

“Is this Operation Northern Shield or Operation Netanyahu Shield?” asked Yoel Hasson, an opposition politician in the Israeli Parliament, on Twitter.

In a letter to the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, he questioned both the timing of what he dismissively called a “bulldozer operation,” and the overwrought way in which it had been presented, as if Israel were going into battle.

Israelis have seen this sequence of events before.

When Menachem Begin’s government bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak three weeks before the 1981 elections, for example, many suspected it had been timed for political gain. Mr. Begin denied the assertion, saying Israel had information the plant was about to start operating. Any attack after that point, he argued, could have blanketed Baghdad with radiation.

Still, Mr. Netanyahu was seen as exploiting the fears of ordinary Israelis who are already jittery, seemingly always on the brink of the next war.

Mr. Netanyahu summarized a similar conundrum confronting his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, in 2008, at the height of Mr. Olmert’s legal troubles.

Describing Mr. Olmert, then a rival, as “up to his neck in investigations,” Mr. Netanyahu said: “He does not have a public or moral mandate to determine such fateful matters for the state of Israel when there is the fear, and I have to say it is real and not without basis, that he will make decisions based on his personal interest in political survival and not based on the national interest.”

Mr. Olmert was a caretaker prime minister at the time, having been forced from office even before he was criminally charged. Unlike Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Olmert was an unpopular prime minister, widely blamed for Israel’s perceived failure in the monthlong war against Hezbollah in 2006. He eventually went to prison for crimes including bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice and breach of trust.

Others defended Mr. Netanyahu and gave more charitable explanations for the aggressive publicity surrounding the anti-tunnel operation. They said Israel needed to build international legitimacy for the action in case it led to an escalation, since Hezbollah’s response is not yet clear.

In addition, the publicity appeared intended to show the failures of the United Nations peacekeeping monitors in southern Lebanon, and the flouting of United Nations resolutions by the Lebanese government and Hezbollah.

“Discovering tunnels is a vast challenge,” wrote Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli military intelligence chief and now director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, “and the time for National Security Awards and decorations will come, social-media cynicism aside.”

Professor Avineri said the anti-tunnel operation had been clearly legitimate but “overshadowed by the fact that it’s been exaggerated, presented as a bit more than it is and working for the benefit of Netanyahu politically.”

He added: “Everything has to be deconstructed in terms of the election campaign, which is taking place on both sides, including the opposition. In a country where security and defense are at the core of political debate, every government tries to utilize it for its own purposes and the opposition will criticize it for whatever it does.”

And if anything, Mr. Netanyahu is known to be cautious and averse to military adventures.

Zipi Israeli, an expert in public opinion and national security, said historically, military campaigns have rarely helped incumbents in elections.

“I think Netanyahu understands that,” she said. “If things deteriorate and there are casualties, that won’t be in his favor.”

She added, “The festivities are usually only on the first day.”

Follow Isabel Kershner on Twitter: @IKershner

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