A new scandal, involving an aide to the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is shaking the Israeli political scene. The case concerns secret defense documents relating to the war in Gaza published in early September by two foreign press organs, the British weekly Jewish Chronicle and the German daily Bild. According to Israeli justice, the leak of these classified documents, emanating from the Israeli army, could have caused “serious damage to state security” and hindering efforts to free hostages held in the Palestinian enclave.
The Israeli press goes further: it suggests that the documents transmitted to the two newspapers, which were largely manipulated, are part of an opaque influence campaign, orchestrated by Netanyahu, to torpedo any possibility of an agreement with Hamas . The Israeli Prime Minister is regularly accused of deliberately prolonging the war in Gaza, for fear that a cessation of hostilities would open the way to an investigation into the security fiasco of October 7, which could prove fatal to him.
Five people have already been arrested as part of the investigation into the leaks, launched in September by the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence), the police and the army. The only suspect whose identity has been revealed in court at this point on Sunday is Captain Eli Feldstein, who worked as a spokesperson in the Prime Minister’s Office for Israeli Defense Journalists. .
This function, however, was not clearly established at the administrative level, since the officer did not appear, it seems, on the personnel list and, according to our information, would have continued to receive his reservist salary of the army. An aggravating circumstance is that Eli Feldstein had not been accredited by the Shin Bet to access secret defense information, even though he participated on several occasions, alongside Benyamin Netanyahu, in visits to sites requiring this accreditation.
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The affair started as soon as the “leaks” were published. On September 5, the Jewish Chroniclethe oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper on the planet, published what it presented as a “scoop”, based on “intelligence sources” Israeli. He claimed that Yahya Sinouar, the leader of Hamas and mastermind of October 7 – who was killed on October 16 by the Israeli army – planned to escape from Gaza, taking Israeli hostages, via the tunnels. dug under the Philadelphia Corridor, the corridor separating Egyptian Sinai from the coastal territory. According to the British weekly, Sinouar planned to then join Iran, the protector of the Palestinian Islamist movement.
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