Israeli police have arrested a top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over allegedly leaking classified information to foreign media.
Opposition leaders say the intelligence was “faked,” and part of a ruse to thwart a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza.
The investigation centers on allegations that the prime minister’s office promoted to foreign media the claim that Hamas was planning on smuggling hostages out of Gaza over the Egyptian border and creating divisions in Israeli society to pressure Netanyahu into a hostage release and ceasefire deal.
Eliezer Feldstein, who has been named by opposition politicians as an aide to Netanyahu, is among several people being interrogated over the leak of “classified and sensitive intelligence information,” according to court documents.
A court order made public on Sunday said that information taken from the Israeli military’s systems and “illegally issued” may have damaged Israel’s ability to free hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
A spokesperson for Netanyahu denied that there have been leaks from the Prime Minister’s Office, PMO, and that the “person in question never participated in security-related discussions,” apparently referring to Feldstein.
The PMO also downplayed the possibility that the leak impacted negotiations with Hamas over the release of hostages from Gaza, calling the claim “ridiculous.”
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Opposition leader Yair Lapid on Sunday accused the prime minister’s office of leaking “faked secret documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal – to shape a public opinion influence operation against the hostages’ families.”
Families of hostages held in Gaza have accused Netanyahu of repeatedly thwarting an agreement with Hamas, believing that an end to the Gaza war would force the prime minister to hold elections. Netanyahu is alleged to have, in the past, torpedoed agreements with 11th hour demands – something he denies.
The alleged leaks were the basis of two articles published in September, one in the Jewish Chronicle, in the United Kingdom, and another in Germany’s Bild, both citing Israeli intelligence sources and supporting a narrative being pushed by Netanyahu at the time.
The articles were published as ceasefire and hostage release negotiations were ongoing, but also as thousands of Israelis demonstrated almost daily calling on the government to strike a deal with Hamas and bring Israeli hostages home.
Those demonstrations intensified after the Israeli military announced on September 1 that six Israelis were killed in Gaza – four of them were due to be released in a first wave of the potential deal.
The next day, Netanyahu held a news conference and presented an alleged Hamas document he said was found in a tunnel in Gaza.
The document, he said, showed that Hamas was trying to divide Israelis. “I am not going to surrender to this pressure,” Netanyahu said, and reiterated his demand that Israel control the Gaza-Egypt border, also known as the Philadelphi corridor. Doing so would “prevent the smuggling of our hostages to Sinai,” he said. “They can pop up in Iran or Yemen.”
CNN
