Israeli police have arrested a top adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for allegedly leaking classified information to foreign media.
Opposition leaders say the intelligence was “falsified” and part of a ploy to thwart a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza.
The investigation is focused on allegations that the prime minister’s office promoted claims to foreign media that Hamas planned to smuggle hostages from Gaza across the Egyptian border and sowed divisions in Israeli society to pressure Netanyahu to release hostages and reach a ceasefire deal.
Eliezer Feldstein, who has been named by opposition politicians as an adviser to Netanyahu, is among several people being questioned about leaking “classified and sensitive intelligence information,” according to court documents. A court order made public Sunday said that information extracted from Israeli military systems and “illegally released” may have harmed Israel’s ability to free hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
A spokesman for Netanyahu denied that there were any leaks from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and that the “person in question has never participated in any security-related discussions,” apparently referring to Feldstein.
The PMO also downplayed the possibility that the leak affected negotiations with Hamas over the release of hostages from Gaza, calling the claim “ridiculous.”
Opposition leader Yair Lapid accused the prime minister’s office on Sunday of leaking “falsified classified documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal — to influence a public opinion influence operation against the families of the hostages.”
Families of hostages held in Gaza have accused Netanyahu of repeatedly thwarting a deal with Hamas, believing that an end to the Gaza war would force the prime minister to hold elections. Netanyahu has reportedly torpedoed deals in the past with last-minute demands, which he denies.
The alleged leaks formed the basis for two articles published in September, one in the Jewish Chronicle in the United Kingdom and another in the German Bild, both of which cited Israeli intelligence sources and supported a narrative pushed by Netanyahu at the time.
The articles were published amid ongoing ceasefire and hostage release negotiations, 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 had been killed in Gaza — four of whom were to be released in a first wave of the potential deal.
The next day, Netanyahu held a press conference and presented a supposed Hamas document that he said had been found in a tunnel in Gaza. The document, he said, showed that Hamas was trying to divide Israelis. “I will not give in to this pressure,” Netanyahu said, reiterating his demand that Israel control the Gaza-Egypt border, also known as the Philadelphia corridor. If we did so, we would “prevent the smuggling of our hostages to Sinai,” he said. “They could show up in Iran or Yemen.”
Just days later, the Jewish Chronicle published an article claiming that intelligence sources said that “Sinwar’s plan was to smuggle himself and the remaining Hamas leaders along with Israeli hostages through the Philadelphia corridor into Sinai and from there into Iran.”
The article said the information was gathered “during the interrogation of a captured senior Hamas official, as well as through information obtained from documents seized on Thursday, August 29, the day the six bodies of the murdered hostages were recovered.” It has since been removed, but an archived version is still available.
The prime minister’s son, Yair Netanyahu, promoted the article on his social media.
At a press conference on September 10, Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told a reporter: “I do not know the kind of information you mentioned about Sinwar and the hostages in Philadelphia.”
At the same time, an article in the German newspaper Bild said that a Hamas document it referred to was written by Yahya Sinwar and that it showed how the group was prolonging the war and trying to sow divisions within Israel and put pressure on the families of the hostages so that they could in turn put pressure on the government. Bild cited an intelligence document and repeated claims Netanyahu made during his September 2 press conference.
In a statement on September 8, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that the document cited by Bild was not written by Sinwar and that it was an old document found five months ago and “was written as a recommendation by the Hamas middle class and not by Sinwar.”
The information did not constitute “new information,” the IDF said, adding that it “had been presented to decision-makers several times, even before the document in question was found.” The statement added that it was investigating the leak of the document, which “constitutes a serious offense.”
After the court lifted a gag order on Sunday, families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza pointed to the prime minister’s office, saying that “suspicions indicate that people associated with the prime minister acted to carry out one of the greatest deceptions in the country’s history.”
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid and Benny Gants — who left Netanyahu’s wartime cabinet earlier this year — have framed the alleged leaks as a failure at the top of the government, with Gantz calling it a “national crime.”
Both have blamed Netanyahu’s office for the leak, with Gantz accusing Netanyahu of using the leaks for political gain. Lapid also questioned whether the leak was intentional given the collapse of hostage negotiations with Hamas earlier this year, according to a joint statement from the two opposition leaders on Sunday.
“It is suspected that Netanyahu’s team published secret documents and falsified secret documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal,” Lapid said in a statement. “This affair came from the prime minister’s office itself, and the investigation must determine whether it was not on the prime minister’s orders.”