PM’s chief of staff, appealing release terms, says police probe is ‘delusional, political’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, filed an appeal Monday against the terms of his release from police custody, decrying what he called a “delusional, political investigation.”

Braverman was released Sunday night after he was interrogated at length about his alleged attempt to obstruct a probe into the leak of classified documents from the Prime Minister’s Office to German tabloid Bild.

Braverman is under restrictive conditions, including a 15-day ban on entering the Prime Minister’s Office and a 30-day ban on leaving the country, which risks delaying his entry into the post of ambassador to the United Kingdom.

“The bail conditions are extreme, unusual and clearly disproportionate,” Braverman’s lawyer, Jack Chen, told the Rishon Lezion District Court, in quotations carried by Hebrew media outlets.

Chen asserted that his client “was forced, late at night, to agree to the conditions of his release, while noting that ‘I am approving these conditions amid protest, given no choice. This is a delusional, political investigation.”

He said Braverman was told that if he didn’t sign onto the conditions of his release, “the police would be forced to arrest him and bring him before a judge,” even if this meant holding him overnight.

“The appellant is the chief of staff of the Prime Minister’s Office. He is at the end of his term, and in a very short time is supposed to enter office as Israel’s ambassador to the UK. Imposing conditions like these on him will prevent him from the necessary work of finishing up in his important role in the PMO and ‘passing the baton’ in an orderly fashion,” Chen argued.

Similar restrictions to Braverman’s were also reportedly imposed on Omer Mansour, a spokesperson in the PMO who was called for questioning alongside Braverman on Sunday.

The pair were detained for interrogation after Netanyahu’s former spokesman and the key suspect in the Bild leak affair, Eli Feldstein, alleged last month that Braverman knew of a covert investigation into the leak months before it was publicized and had assured Feldstein that he’d be able to quash the probe.

In an interview with the Kan public broadcaster last month, Feldstein said Braverman asked to meet him late at night in an underground parking lot in the Kirya military headquarters, where he informed him that the IDF had launched an investigation into the leak.

Braverman’s lawyer said Monday that “the investigation is based on a previously withheld claim by a criminal defendant who refused to cooperate at the time of his questioning, and decided instead to make his voice heard a year and a half later, in the context of a television interview.”

The Bild affair followed the execution of six Israeli hostages at the hands of their Hamas captors, when Israeli troops approached 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 ceasefire negotiations due to Netanyahu’s perceived prioritization of an amorphous “total victory” over Hamas at the expense of hostages’ lives. The document leaked to Bild appeared to be an attempt by Netanyahu’s office to shift the blame for the failure of talks to Hamas.