Israel’s State Attorney’s Office announced on Sunday that it will file charges against a close advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and another suspect on allegations of illegally obtaining and leaking top-secret documents.
The state attorney’s office on Sunday also requested a five-day extension to the suspects’ confinement, during which it intends to file an indictment, as well as request that they remain jailed until the end of the legal proceedings due to the case’s breadth and sensitivity.
The spokesperson, Eliezer Feldstein, was arrested on November 2 alongside four other suspects, all four of whom are security personnel whose names are still under gag order. While some of the other suspects have been released to house arrest, Feldstein has remained in prison since then.
Another member of Netanyahu’s media team, Yonatan Urich, was interrogated on Thursday as well.
A lawyer of one of the suspects in the case revealed in an interview on Army Radio on Tuesday morning that Netanyahu was handed the classified information at the heart of the investigation and even requested to receive more. This contradicted a statement by the prime minister’s office on November 2, soon after the investigation became public, that “the document that was published did not arrive at the prime minister’s office from the [IDF] Intelligence Directorate, and the prime minister learned about it from the media.”
Although the document at the heart of the investigation is classified, it is widely believed to be linked to a publication from early September in the German newspaper Bild.
What did the document say?
The document said, amongst other details, that Hamas was intentionally sowing internal division in Israel over the hostage issue and did not intend to go through with a deal. Information approved for publication by the judge overseeing the case said that it could have negatively affected Israel’s ability to free the hostages being held by Hamas.
According to additional information allowed for publication on Sunday afternoon, one of the suspects, who served in an IDF intelligence unit responsible for information security, allegedly sent on his own initiative a top-secret document to Feldstein via social media. Feldstein leaked the document at first to Israeli journalists, but they were blocked by the IDF censor from publishing it. He then allegedly, with the help of another individual, leaked the document to a foreign media outlet.
Feldstein then told Israeli journalists ahead of time about the foreign media report and suggested that they follow up on it. Some of the journalists began to suspect the authenticity of the document that was leaked to foreign media outlets. Feldstein responded by demanding that the intelligence reservist provide him with the original document. The reservist met Feldstein and gave him the document, alongside two other classified documents.
According to the information released by the court, the document’s release could potentially have caused severe harm to Israeli security.
The report came out as public pressure against the prime minister and in favor of a deal peaked after the bodies of six hostages had been located in southern Gaza after being executed just days before. Netanyahu insisted at the time that it was Hamas, not him, who was refusing to carry out a deal.
