New Delhi:
A former spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been arrested for allegedly leaking confidential documents that may have harmed Gaza hostage negotiations.
Eliezer Feldstein was detained along with three other people on Monday over the leak of “classified and sensitive intelligence information”. The Israeli court said the release of the documents ran the risk of causing “severe harm to state security”. “As a result, the ability of security bodies to achieve the objective of releasing the hostages, as part of the war goals, could have been compromised,” it added.
Israel’s domestic security agency and the army launched an investigation into the breach in September after two newspapers, British weekly The Jewish Chronicle and Germany’s Bild tabloid, published articles based on the classified military documents.
One claimed a document had been uncovered showing that then Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar — later killed by Israel — and the hostages in Gaza would be smuggled out of the territory into Egypt through the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border. The other was based on what was said to be an internal memo from the Hamas leadership on Sinwar’s strategy to hamper talks towards the liberation of hostages.
The first document leaked turned out to be fake, and the internal memo was in fact written by lower-level Hamas militants, Israeli media reports said.
Opposition leaders, meanwhile, questioned if Mr Netanyahu is complicit in the leak. Key opposition leader Yair Lapid told journalists on Sunday the details of “the serious security affair in Netanyahu’s office should alarm every Israeli”. “This affair originated in the prime minister’s office, and the investigation needs to determine whether it was not under the prime minister’s orders,” Lapid added.
Another leading opposition figure, Benny Gantz, said, “This is not a case of suspected leaks but rather profiteering with state secrets for political purposes.”
Mr Netanyahu denied the allegations, saying “the document published by Bild had never arrived” at his office. Without mentioning Feldstein by name, he said the former aide “had never taken part in security meetings or consulted confidential documents”.
