Netanyahu’s ex-aide says PM was ‘behind’ leak of intel to Bild and lied about it after

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the one behind the leak of classified intelligence aimed at swaying the Israeli public’s opinion regarding ongoing hostage negotiations last year, his beleaguered former spokesperson Eli Feldstein alleged on Tuesday.

“In order to [publicize] such a document, the prime minister must be in the picture – from beginning to end,” Feldstein said in an interview with the Kan public broadcaster.

In the second portion of a three-part series, Feldstein went further than he did in the first interview that aired on Monday, when he only claimed that Netanyahu was aware and supportive of the classified intel leak to the Bild German daily.

“He (Netanyahu) is the one who ultimately was behind the leak,” Feldstein said emphatically, adding that he told interrogators the same thing repeatedly after his arrest and eventual indictment over the matter.

The document in question was an internal Hamas memo purporting to show that the terror group wasn’t interested in the compromises necessary to reach a hostage deal. After it was leaked to the Bild, Netanyahu used it to argue that only further military pressure would lead to the release of the hostages.

However, it was later revealed in media reports that Bild had seriously distorted the file to serve the interests of the Netanyahu government.

The document was branded as classified by the IDF, making it prohibited for publication by Israel’s military censor, amid concern that an intelligence source in Gaza could be endangered by its release.

In order to publish the document anyway, Feldstein leaked it to an international news outlet, given that foreign media isn’t beholden to Israel’s military censor. The tactic is, in fact, used rather regularly by Israeli government and security officials.

Still, he insisted in the Kan interview that Netanyahu was aware of the strategy and that it couldn’t have been pulled off without his involvement, given the sensitivity of the document in question.

Feldstein said that after the story was published in the Bild in early September 2024, Netanyahu’s top adviser Jonathan Urich texted him the following message: “The boss (Netanyahu) is thrilled.”

A smoking gun against Netanyahu?

Shortly thereafter, the three of them held a conference call during which Feldstein said Netanyahu thanked him for his work on the matter.

The trio then discussed how they would respond to a query that they themselves would see to it that Channel 12 would submit to the Prime Minister’s Office: Did the army inform Netanyahu of the existence of this Hamas memo?

The goal of the query was to allow Netanyahu to push the narrative that the IDF was hiding information from the political echelon, as this would bolster the argument that the premier wasn’t responsible for Hamas’s October 7 onslaught — a message he was intent on advancing.

In the first portion of his interview that aired on Monday, Feldstein revealed how Netanyahu was hyper-focused on combating media narratives that were critical of his conduct and had directed his aides to limit public chatter about him being “responsible” for Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.

During the conference call shortly after the Bild leak, the three agreed that Netanyahu’s office would insist – falsely – that the premier had not heard about the document from the army and only learned about it from the media, Feldstein told Kan.

Feldstein, Urich, and a close adviser to the premier, Yisrael (Srulik) Einhorn, are all being criminally investigated in connection with the leak of stolen classified intelligence in the so-called Bild case.

Feldstein was arrested in October 2024 and later charged with leaking stolen intelligence to Bild the previous month.

He has been indicted along with military intelligence reservist Ari Rosenfeld, who was the source within the IDF that handed over the classified document.

Netanyahu himself is not a suspect in the probe, though he may well become one if Feldstein’s assertions regarding the prime minister’s involvement are proven accurate.

While Urich has purported to have no knowledge of any criminal wrongdoing, Feldstein told Kan that Urich “knew everything that I knew… Where [the document] came from, why it wasn’t put out in Israel, all of it.”

“Read all my texts [with Urich]. I don’t conceal anything,” Feldstein told Kan. “Other than asking him if I can go pee, he [was behind] everything.”

The ex-spokesman said he is certain that, by the eve of the classified document’s publication in the Bild, Urich had informed the premier of the plan to leak it.

The Bild leak was triggered by the execution of six Israeli hostages at the hands of their Hamas captors, who sensed Israeli troops approaching the tunnel where they were located in the southern Gaza city of Rafah at the end of August 2024.

The execution sparked massive public uproar against the government, which critics saw as the obstacle in hostage negotiations due to Netanyahu’s perceived prioritization of an amorphous “total victory” against Hamas at the expense of the captives’ lives.

‘They took advantage of me’

Feldstein is also a suspect in the so-called Qatargate affair, which has also implicated Netanyahu’s closest advisers.

That case centers around Urich and Feldstein’s alleged side work on behalf of Qatar while they were in Netanyahu’s employ. The work was with the Perception PR firm headed by Einhorn, Netanyahu’s former campaign manager.

In the Tuesday Kan interview, Feldstein denied having knowingly worked on behalf of Qatar or of having known that Urich was doing so.

“I have very good reason to think they used me, took advantage of me,” Feldstein said of Urich and Einhorn.

Felstein was pressed on a series of media interviews he helped organize for Jerusalem Post editor Zvika so that the latter could promote the messages he had heard from Qatari officials on a trip to Doha organized by Perception.

Feldstein insisted that it didn’t occur to him that this might be part of a foreign influence operation, in which a foreign agent for the Qatari government paid Perception to promote a media narrative friendly to Doha.

Moreover, Feldstein told Kan that when he received pro-Qatari messages from Urich to pass along to journalists, he believed it was accurate information.

One of the main allegations against Feldstein is that he was paid by a businessman tied to a foreign agent for Qatar.

Feldstein told Kan that he thought the odd payment scheme was due to the fact that he had failed a security clearance backgound check and therefore couldn’t receive his salary directly from the Prime Minister’s Office.

“Is it possible that things I put out served, aided, helped, after-the-fact, or as a side effect, or a consequence, some official in Qatar? It could be,” he acknowledged. However, he insisted that he was not aware of it in real-time.

“They took me, with my motivation, my desire to belong, to feel a part of something, and they used me,” Feldstein said.

Undercutting Feldstein’s claims, i24News published on Tuesday what it said were texts showing that Feldstein had been in contact with Jay Footlik — a foreign agent for Qatar registered in Washington — who praised his work advancing media messaging that suited Doha.

The network said that Feldstein passed along the message to Urich, who in turn, expressed his own approval, given that Urich is also alleged to have been working on Qatar’s behalf

Bennett urges probe of Netanyahu in Qatargate ‘betrayal’ case

As the Qatargate revelations mounted regarding Netanyahu and his inner circle, former prime minister Naftali Bennett gave a statement to the press in which he called on Israel’s law enforcement agencies to leave no stone unturned in investigating the scandal and to question Netanyahu himself.

Bennett said the actions of Netanyahu’s inner circle “are a “knife in the heart of our heroic soldiers and a knife in the heart of the entire people of Israel.”

“This is the gravest betrayal in the history of the State of Israel because it does not come from minor figures… but from the most senior and powerful people in Israel. We must honestly acknowledge that planting active agents inside the office of the prime minister of Israel is a significant intelligence and security success for our enemy, Qatar.”

Bennett says that he is “not claiming that Netanyahu gave the order to act on behalf of Qatar, or even that he knew his closest advisers were receiving hundreds of thousands of shekels from the enemy.” But he said the public had a right to know why the prime minister remains silent and continues “at this very moment, to cover up the betrayal in his office.”

Netanyahu, Bennett asserted, should have fired his advisers and summoned Israeli law enforcement to investigate the moment he learned about the scandal.

However, Netanyahu acted in “exactly the opposite way,” alleged Bennett, accusing the prime minister and his team of “doing everything they can to torpedo the investigation of the truth.”

Likud hit back at Bennett, accusing him of mudslinging in order to distract from his own problems.

In a statement, Likud said that Qatargate suspects Einhorn and Feldstein “were never part of the Prime Minister’s Bureau.”

To make this claim, Netanyahu’s office is apparently relying on the fact that Feldstein failed his security clearance background check and therefore was never formally employed by the government. However, this did not appear to stop Netanyahu from using his services, and Feldstein was photographed in high-level security meetings with Netanyahu over the past year.

Feldstein was widely known by reporters as Netanyahu’s spokesperson for military affairs throughout the war, regardless of whether he was receiving his paycheck directly from the prime minister’s office.

After Feldstein’s arrest last year, Netanyahu’s office first claimed that he wasn’t an employee. The premier then shifted to defending him as a loyal aide before eventually turning on him, after Feldstein began telling investigators that all of his actions were at the direction of the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Tuesday Likud statement insisted that no evidence has shown any ties between Netanyahu’s office and Qatar.

“Since the beginning of the war, the Prime Minister’s Office and the prime minister have attacked Qatar, and Qatar has attacked the prime minister countless times,” Likud said, accusing Bennett of inventing blood libels against Netanyahu’s party to divert attention from “the serious materials revealed in the hacking of his phone, which are being concealed from the public eye.”

Last week, Bennett acknowledged that hackers had gained access to his Telegram account, and a number of files, including his contact list, were posted online.