Ari Rosenfeld, a suspect in a leaks affair involving the Prime Minister’s Office, can be released from prison to house arrest, the State Attorney’s Office announced on Thursday.
It marks a reversal of the State Attorney’s position, which was based on the recommendation of the security establishment, that given Rosenfeld’s extensive knowledge of classified material and the actions attributed to him, he was too dangerous to be let go.
Now the state claims that there has been a “change of circumstances in the position of the professional officials.”
The State Attorney’s Office had been keeping Rosenfeld locked up despite the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet, determining a month ago that Rosenfeld did not constitute a danger and could be released to home arrest, Kan News reported on Jan. 16.
In December, Rosenfeld’s lawyers appealed to the court asking that Rosenfeld be released to house arrest, citing an expert’s evaluation that he would not repeat his actions, a polygraph test showing that Rosenfeld was telling the truth, and a determination by the Prison Service that his health was deteriorating.
On Nov. 21, Rosenfeld, together with the prime suspect, Eli Feldstein, were indicted for allegedly providing secret information with the intention of damaging state security, an offense carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
Rosenfeld was accused of transferring classified documents to Feldstein, who worked with the Prime Minister’s Office.
Feldstein passed on the information he obtained from Rosenfeld to Germany’s Bild newspaper. That document became the basis of a Sept. 6 story asserting that Hamas wasn’t interested in a ceasefire deal, and only wanted to drag out talks to gain time to rebuild its warfighting capabilities, exhaust Israel’s military, spark internal dissent in Israel and pin the blame for the deal’s failure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu referred to the Bild story in a Sept. 8 Cabinet meeting, saying it revealed that Hamas planned “to tear us apart from within” but that “the great majority of Israel’s citizens are not falling into this Hamas trap.”
Exposing Hamas’s methods
Opponents of the prime minister, including some hostages’ families, accused Netanyahu of purposely leaking the document to torpedo a ceasefire deal so as to pursue his war aims and his political survival.
Netanyahu’s office argued that the document’s release didn’t compromise the effort to free the hostages but helped it by exposing Hamas’s methods of applying psychological pressure by blaming Israel for the failure of talks, “when everyone knows—as has been confirmed repeatedly by U.S. officials—that Hamas is preventing the deal.”
Critics of the case say that the arrest is political and that it is absurd to consider passing information to the prime minister a threat to national security, and that Benjamin Netanyahu should have been given the information to begin with.
They say that it is impossible to understand the case outside of the context of ongoing efforts by the IDF General Staff and the Shin Bet to whitewash their culpability for events related to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and to shift the blame onto Netanyahu.
The IDF and Shin Bet are helped by allies in the justice system led by the attorney general and the Supreme Court, who are determined to oust Netanyahu from power, those critics say.
According to former JNS senior contributing editor Caroline Glick, investigative reports show that the IDF “received multiple, rapidly escalating warnings” of Hamas’s invasion plans a year before Oct. 7, 2023.
“Intelligence head Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar did not share the warnings or Hamas’s intercepted invasion plans with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” she wrote.
“Instead, they repeatedly briefed him that Hamas was deterred, and [that] Israel simply needed to provide it with more cash from Qatar and more work permits for Gazans in Israel to keep the terrorist regime fat, happy and deterred,” Glick said. JNS
{Matzav.com}