The second suspect in the leaked documents affair involving the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office has been identified as Ari Rosenfeld, an NCO in the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence Directorate.
Justice Ala’a Masarwa of the Tel Aviv District Court ruled on Sunday evening that Rosenfeld’s name could be published, but information regarding his rank, position and areas of activity withheld.
The judge’s decision came in response to a request by Rosenfeld that his identity be revealed. He has so far been referred to in the press only by the first initial of his first name.
Rosenfeld said he didn’t understand why his identity needed to be kept hidden, arguing that he couldn’t fight for his reputation if his name remained blacked out.
“My name is being tarnished and I can’t defend my good name,” he said.
The main suspect, Eliezer Feldstein, a spokesman for military affairs in the PMO, was ordered released from prison to house arrest by Israel’s Supreme Court on Dec. 9.
Rosenfeld remains incarcerated. Supreme Court Justice Alex Stein accused him during the Dec. 9 appeal of seeing himself as “entitled to take the reins and establish direct communication channels between himself and government officials in ways he sees fit.”
However, Rosenfeld said on Sunday, “I was wrong in the way I acted. I’ll never do it again.”
He added, “All my life I have worked for the benefit of the state in the military service for the security of the state. I have served the state in several organizations. I have always given of myself.”
He said that he missed his family and his two-and-a-half-year-old son. “I worry about them, and they worry about me. I think about them all the time, and I don’t understand how it turned out that I’m still in detention.”
Rosenfeld’s family immigrated from America. He was born and raised in Jerusalem. He has volunteered for years in associations for children with cancer and children with disabilities and special needs, his family said.
He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and criminology from Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, and served three and a half years of regular army duty, during which time he was awarded prizes and certificates of recognition for his work.
His father, Shmuel, told Ynet: “We hope that by the holiday he will be at home, at least he should be home. He’s still in custody.”
He added: “He’s in custody for something he might do, because he has information in his head. Are you holding someone in custody for something they might do in the future? ًًًًWhy are you holding him? What information does he have, that is perhaps not relevant today? Let him go home.”
The two chief rabbis of Israel, Kalman Ber and David Yosef, signed a letter on Dec. 21 requesting that Rosenfeld be released.
“We fear that the matter is causing a deep and difficult rift between communities in Israel,” they wrote, echoing a Dec. 20 call by 50 Knesset members and coalition ministers urging the release of Feldstein and Rosenfeld.
They, too, noted that “the continued legal proceedings against [the suspects] pose a real threat to social cohesion at this critical time for the State of Israel.”
Feldstein and Rosenfeld were indicted by the State Attorney’s Office for endangering state security by passing classified information to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Feldstein received the information from Rosenfeld.
Before being charged, they were denied access to their attorneys for several weeks.
While the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), Israel’s internal security service, says it is only interested in identifying and stopping the leaks, Netanyahu has suggested that the case is politically motivated, 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 into 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 [that] 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.
Feldstein passed on the information he obtained from Rosenfeld to Germany’s Bild newspaper. That document became the basis of a Sept. 6 story asserting that Hamas wasn’t interested in a ceasefire deal, and only wanted to drag out talks to gain time to rebuild its military capabilities, exhaust Israel’s military and spark internal dissent in Israel and pin blame on 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 that “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 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.”