The leak that’s plaguing Netanyahu’s government

Early September, days after the gruesome discovery of six murdered Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Gaza, a dramatic scoop appeared in Bild. The German newspaper had obtained a secret internal Hamas document, supposedly obtained from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s personal computer, that revealed Hamas’s hostage negotiation strategy. The document claimed that Hamas was deliberately exploiting the divisions in Israeli society, manipulating the families of the hostages to help blame Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for not making a deal.

A day earlier, the UK’s Jewish Chronicle had posted another story based on sensational Israeli intelligence: a claim that Sinwar was planning to smuggle himself and some hostages out of Gaza into Egypt via tunnels and travel with them to Iran.

The two news stories came just as the Israeli public was angry at Netanyahu for failing to make a hostage deal, leading to the six deaths. The IDF claimed that the stories were based on fake or misrepresented documents, but that didn’t stop Netanyahu from citing the Bild and JC reports as proof that Hamas was never serious, that his demands were vital and that the hostage families’ protests were aiding Hamas.

The Feldstein affair is not the only scandal hovering over the prime minister’s office

Meanwhile, in London, a scandal ensued. Elon Perry, the JC reporter that broke the story, was accused of being a fantasist who embellished his résumé and, naturally, was suspected of inventing his reports. The JC pulled the stories and the world moved on. 

Until recently, when Israeli courts lifted a gag order, revealing that Eliezer Feldstein, a media aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, was arrested for stealing classified intelligence documents and passing them to Bild, as part of an effort to undermine the hostage negotiations and make the public more sympathetic to Netanyahu. 

Feldstein, a former media aide to far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, was brought into the prime minister’s office on a semi-formal basis at the start of the war in October 2023. The Shin Bet security service believes that rogue military intelligence officers reached out to him, offering to feed him raw intelligence that they believed should be seen by Netanyahu. 

Feldstein took documents and decided to leak them to the media for political advantage. First he passed them to Israeli journalists, but the country’s strict military censorship rules prohibited publication. To get around the law, he then leaked them to foreign journalists instead, with Bild running the Hamas document story. Once published abroad, Israeli reporters could legally cover it freely. 

All of this meant, of course, that many Israeli journalists knew exactly who leaked the documents all along, and just played along with the story of the “mystery foreign source.”

Benjamin Netanyahu’s office claims that Netanyahu himself was never given any documents by Feldstein, never saw them and was completely unaware of anything Feldstein did. The official line is that Feldstein wasn’t even really a Netanyahu aide but just a low-level hanger-on without a security clearance. Critics note that the reason Feldstein didn’t have security clearance was because he failed the background checks. 

The Israeli right has long argued that Israel is secretly ruled by a left-wing deep state of the military, Shin Bet, judiciary and civil service. They blame the Hamas attacks of October 7 on this deep state, not on the totally innocent Netanyahu whose every bad decision was the result of malign manipulation. Some even claim that the security services allowed October 7 to happen or collaborated with Hamas in order to make Netanyahu look bad. 

To these conspiracy theorists, the Feldstein affair is proof that the IDF is keeping secrets from the prime minister to advance a nefarious agenda. 

However, Netanyahu denies ever seeing any of these stolen documents. So his partisans are left in the uncomfortable position of having to defend Feldstein for something that Netanyahu claims not to have happened. 

The Feldstein affair is not the only scandal hovering over the prime minister’s office. Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, was questioned under caution on suspicion of blackmailing a military officer into changing the minutes of key meetings that took place on October 7 as the Hamas attack was ongoing. Braverman was suspected of using secret footage of the officer having an affair to pressure him into making the changes. 

Netanyahu’s response to these roiling scandals has been to claim that there’s a witch-hunt against him. Privately, there is intense speculation that he intends to fire Ronen Bar, the director of the Shin Bet security agency which has spearheaded the investigations. With Donald Trump’s election, perhaps Netanyahu feels more willing to work as a domestic strongman of the type Trump admires, firing rivals and releasing cronies. 

Netanyahu himself is not currently directly implicated in the document leaks, but almost nobody believes he was completely ignorant of his aides’ actions. and either way, they served his agenda of blaming both Hamas and his domestic opponents for the failure of any deal. 

More than thirteen months into this war, hostage and ceasefire talks remain essentially stalled, despite half-hearted attempts to revive them. Hamas demands that Israel withdraw from the Gaza strip and leave it in power before it is willing to release any hostages; Israel maintains that this would amount to surrendering to Hamas. To a certain extent, debates about the details of a deal are a sideshow as long as both of those things remain true.

Braverman has strongly denied the allegations in the Times of Israel, calling them “severe slander” and “wild incitement.”

Perry and Fieldstein have not responded to requests for comment.