The HaKol HaYehudi news outlet on Wednesday requested that the Tel Aviv District Court reveal the name of a “foreign entity” that has been implicated in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel.
Attorney Nati Rom, of the Honenu legal aid group that is representing the Israeli website, said the Nov. 21 indictment against Eli Feldstein, a former spokesman in the Prime Minister’s Office and chief suspect in a leaked files case, accuses him of possessing “confidential information about the possible involvement of [censored] in the 7/10/23 incident.”
The State Attorney’s Office previously said in a statement that “these are not names of people or an organization but of a foreign entity.”
Col. (res.) Ronen Cohen, the former director of the Terrorism Desk in the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, told i24News this week that “when they say that this is not the name of a person or a terrorist group, I believe it is the Palestinian Authority.”
“If I am indeed right that it is the P.A., I want to use the word ‘betrayal’ for the first time,” continued Cohen. “Because they did not want to convey to the Prime Minister’s Office and the prime minister that there may be possible involvement of the Palestinian Authority in the massacre.”
“If this assessment is indeed correct, there was a betrayal there on the part of the internal systems of the Shin Bet and the IDF,” he charged.
Wrote Rom to the Tel Aviv District Court on Wednesday, “The applicant believes that, given the significant public interest in the affair that is the subject of the proceedings, and the concealment of the foreign entity from the eyes of the Israeli public in particular, the court would do well to order the lifting of the censorship so that the public can see who the factor is regarding whom there is information about his possible involvement.”
Alternatively, Rom suggested that the court allow it to be confirmed or denied that the Palestinian Authority was mentioned in the leaked intelligence files that were discovered in Feldstein’s possession.
Jibril Rajoub, a senior official in the P.A.’s ruling Fatah party and a former head of the P.A.’s Preventive Security Force, said last year that Hamas’s massacre of some 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, was carried out “in the context of the defensive war our people are waging.”
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction has praised and celebrated the cross-border terrorist assault, in which also 251 people were taken as hostages and thousands more were wounded.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization closely affiliated with Fatah, has claimed that its members joined Hamas on Oct. 7 and attacked “behind enemy lines” inside the Jewish state.
(JNS)