Fifty Knesset Members and ministers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition asked President Isaac Herzog to grant clemency to the two main suspects in the leaked documents case involving the Prime Minister’s Office.
“The current reality in Israeli society calls for extra caution. The intensive and unusual investigation the defendants endured, along with the continued legal proceedings against them, pose a real threat to social cohesion at this critical time for the State of Israel,” they wrote in a letter to the president.
“Furthermore, the continuation of the proceedings may damage the public’s confidence in the Shin Bet as a state body that stands above all political controversy,” they added.
The request follows one by several MKs to the president to grant clemency to one of the defendants, a noncommissioned officer in the Military Intelligence Directorate, whose name has been withheld from the public and is identified only by the initial “A.”
The President’s Office replied to the first submission: “The request for amnesty of Defendant A has been received at the President’s Residence and an investigation into it has begun. It will be emphasized and made clear—the president of the state has full confidence in the legal system and the request will be examined and reviewed like all requests submitted to the President’s Residence.”
The main suspect, Eliezer Feldstein, a spokesman for military affairs in the Prime Minister’s Office, was ordered released from prison to house arrest by Israel’s Supreme Court on Dec. 9.
The second suspect, A., remains incarcerated. Justice Alex Stein accused him of seeing himself as “entitled to take the reins and establish direct communication channels between himself and government officials in ways he sees fit.”
A. has expressed remorse for his actions, his attorneys say.
Feldstein and A. were indicted by the State Attorney’s Office for endangering state security by passing classified information to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Feldstein received the information from A.
Before being charged, they were denied access to their attorneys for several weeks.
While the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, says it is only interested in identifying and stopping the leaks, Netanyahu has suggested that it is a politically motivated case, noting that there have been numerous leaks from Cabinet meetings, and yet only the one implicating his office is being investigated.
His repeated requests that criminal probes be opened to find the source of the other leaks have been refused by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.
Critics of the indictment
Supporters of the prime minister say that it is absurd to consider passing information to the prime minister a threat to national security, and that he should have been given the information to begin with.
Critics of the indictment say that it is impossible to understand the case outside of the context of ongoing efforts by the IDF General Staff and the Shin Bet to whitewash their culpability for events related to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and to shift the blame onto Netanyahu.
The IDF and Shin Bet are being helped by allies in the justice system led by the attorney general and the Supreme Court, who are determined to oust Netanyahu from power, those critics say.
According to JNS senior contributing editor Caroline Glick, investigative reports show that the IDF “received multiple, rapidly escalating warnings” of Hamas’s invasion plans a year before Oct. 7, 2023.
“Intelligence head Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar did not share the warnings or Hamas’s intercepted invasion plans with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” she wrote.
“Instead, they repeatedly briefed him that Hamas was deterred, and Israel simply needed to provide it with more cash from Qatar and more work permits for Gazans in Israel to keep the terrorist regime fat, happy and deterred,” Glick added.
Following Oct. 7, their efforts to “avoid accepting responsibility for their cataclysmic failures” and to keep the focus on the prime minister, have morphed into openly accusing Netanyahu of blocking a Hamas hostage deal, she said.
“This comes despite the fact that they have known all along that Hamas has never been willing to free the hostages, whom it rightly views as its life-insurance policy,” Glick said.
“Several months ago, a group of intelligence officers and NCOs were concerned because Haliva, his replacement Maj. Gen. Yossi Binder, Bar and Halevi were deliberately blocking information from Netanyahu that the officers and NCOs considered essential to the premier’s ability to make decisions related to the war,” she said.
Feldstein passed on the information he obtained from A. to Germany’s Bild newspaper. That document became the basis of a Sept. 6 story asserting that Hamas wasn’t interested in a hostages-for-ceasefire deal, and only wanted to drag out talks to gain time to rebuild its military capabilities, exhaust Israel’s military and spark internal dissension within Israel that would blame Netanyahu for the failure to reach a deal.
Netanyahu referred to the Bild story in a Sept. 8 Cabinet meeting, saying it revealed that Hamas planned “to tear us apart from within” but “the great majority of Israel’s citizens are not falling into this Hamas trap.”
Opponents of the prime minister, including some hostages’ families, accused Netanyahu of purposely leaking the document to torpedo a hostages-for-ceasefire deal so as to pursue his war aims and his political survival.
Netanyahu’s office argued that the document’s release didn’t compromise the effort to free the hostages but helped it by exposing Hamas’s methods of applying psychological pressure by blaming Israel for the failure of talks, “when everyone knows—as has been confirmed repeatedly by U.S. officials—that Hamas is preventing the deal.”