According to a newly revealed Supreme Court transcript, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was aware that his aide, Eli Feldstein, planned to hand a highly sensitive document to international media, Feldstein’s attorney told the court last month.
During a December 5 session—its record publicized on Wednesday by the Ynet news site—an exchange took place between Feldstein’s lawyer, Oded Savoray, and Supreme Court Justice Alex Stein. Savoray was arguing that Feldstein should be allowed to move from detention to house arrest.
In the course of these proceedings, Savoray further asserted that Feldstein had been acting under instructions from Netanyahu in relation to the security leaks inquiry.
The allegations against Feldstein and Ari Rosenfeld, a reservist noncommissioned officer in the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, lie at the center of a scandal within the Prime Minister’s Office. A highly secret document, purportedly outlining Hamas’s priorities and tactics for hostage negotiations, was allegedly removed from the IDF’s intelligence archive and provided to the German publication Bild.
According to prosecutors, Feldstein’s intent was to shape public attitudes in Netanyahu’s favor during efforts to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, shortly after the terror group murdered six captives last August.
Netanyahu denies any part in, or awareness of, the document’s unauthorized disclosure and is not listed as a suspect.
Following the December 5 hearing, Stein upheld a previous court’s decision to release Feldstein to house arrest, indicating that he no longer posed a security concern. However, Stein decreed that Rosenfeld should remain jailed because of his extensive contact with classified data. Rosenfeld remains in custody.
When advocating for Feldstein’s transfer to house arrest, Savoray contended that his client did not understand the level of confidentiality tied to the file he had leaked, nor did he realize it could compromise the document’s original source.
“This joins the other indications… that he was working in the name of, and according to the instructions of, the prime minister,” Savoray posited.
He went on to recount that, after Netanyahu conducted a press briefing in early September in response to Hamas’s killing of six hostages, Feldstein informed the premier of his strategy to leak the document. This was ostensibly intended to reinforce Netanyahu’s statements regarding Hamas’s negotiating tactics and to shift any blame away from the prime minister for the hostages’ predicament.
Appearing before the Supreme Court, Savoray recounted, “I point to the involvement that [Feldstein] created with the prime minister, when [Feldstein] whispered in [the prime minister’s] ear. After the press conference, he said to the prime minister: ‘I have a document from my sources in the IDF Military Intelligence with the same content but more updated, [top Netanyahu spokesman and adviser Jonatan] Urich and I are working on getting it out.’”
The lawyer indicated that this interaction occurred five days before the classified material was printed by the German newspaper.
During the same hearing, Savoray claimed that Urich, a high-level aide to Netanyahu, was fully informed about the operation and was giving instructions to Feldstein, who occupied a more junior role. Savoray criticized the State Attorney’s Office for declining to press charges against Urich.
“Urich was involved in everything and Feldstein acted on his instructions. They decided to leak the document to the press together,” claimed Savoray.
The indictment against Feldstein suggests that on September 2—one day after word spread of the six hostages being killed—he first provided the document to an Israeli journalist and then informed Urich of his actions.
“Don’t reply and don’t call me, what I’m building for you now for the weekend is worth a million dollars,” Feldstein wrote excitedly, adding: “And [we] need the prime minister for this.”
However, once the military censor blocked that reporter’s story from being published, Urich allegedly told Feldstein to pass the document to Bild via a contact, Srulik Einhorn, who had once been a Likud campaign manager.
After Bild ran its report, Urich wrote to Feldstein, “The boss is pleased,” apparently referring to Netanyahu, whom he had evidently briefed about the article’s publication.
{Matzav.com Israel}