Charges against PM’s top aides could be dropped as prosecution fails to extradite Einhorn

The State Attorney’s Office has been unable to have Yisrael Einhorn, a former adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, extradited to Israel to stand trial on charges of witness intimidation, it told the Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court on Sunday, putting the trial against two other advisers to the premier in jeopardy.

Einhorn, along with two other prime ministerial aides, Ofer Golan and Jonatan Urich, was indicted last year on charges of witness intimidation against a key witness in Netanyahu’s criminal trial in 2019.

The trial is due to start in the coming weeks, but the State Attorney’s Office was reported to have told the court that it cannot begin proceedings against Urich and Golan unless Einhorn himself is present, given the central role he is alleged to have played in the incident.

After leaving his post in the Prime Minister’s Office, Einhorn moved to Serbia, where he has worked as an adviser to President Aleksandar Vučić.

He refused both to return to Israel for the purposes of the legal proceedings against him in the witness intimidation case and to answer questions under caution relating to his alleged role in the Bild leaked documents affair and the Qatargate affair. He is a suspect in both cases, as is Urich.

In light of the prosecution’s inability to have Einhorn extradited, Judge Dror Kleitman asked the state attorney’s representatives to inform the court within two weeks if it wishes to proceed with the trial against Golan and Urich or if it will instead withdraw the indictment.

At the time of the alleged witness intimidation incident in 2019, Einhorn served as a Likud spokesman, while Urich served as a strategic adviser and a senior official in Likud’s election campaign staff, and Golan was a spokesman for the Netanyahu family and the director of the 2019 Likud election campaign.

Netanyahu was, at that point, under investigation for wrongdoing during three years he served as communications minister, in addition to serving as prime minister. Shlomo Filber was appointed by Netanyahu to serve as the director general of the Communications Ministry, and who went on to turn state’s witness against Netanyahu.

Prosecutors alleged, in the indictment against the three prime ministerial advisers, that they arranged for two people to drive a vehicle with a loudspeaker to Filber’s home in Petah Tikva and play recorded messages criticizing him for his testimony to the police against Netanyahu.

Although Einhorn has refused to return to Israel, he was questioned in Serbia by Israeli police in July 2025, over his role in both the document leak and the Qatargate affair. In January, police declared him a “fugitive criminal.”

Following the admission from the State Attorney’s Office, Urich’s lawyer Amit Hadad — who is also representing Netanyahu in his corruption trial — told the court that he recently obtained new investigative materials regarding the witness intimidation case, the Haaretz daily reported. He said that this material had led him to several new witnesses to the case who will deliver testimony, should the trial be cleared to start.

According to Haaretz, the judge overseeing the case told Hadad that these witnesses will be crucial to the trial should Einhorn fail to appear, as “we need to bring people who can answer questions that have come up.”

Unlike the witness intimidation case, Einhorn’s absence is unlikely to impact proceedings in the Bild leak case or the Qatargate affair, as there is sufficient information on the allegations from the other suspects and from people who gave testimony.

In the Bild affair, Einhorn, Urich, and fellow ex-Netanyahu aide Eli Feldstein are accused of leaking a classified IDF document to the Bild newspaper in Germany in summer 2024 to influence Israeli public opinion about hostage negotiations with Hamas.

Separately, in the Qatargate affair, Einhorn, Urich, and Feldstein are accused of taking money to spearhead a public relations campaign to cast Qatar in a positive light for over a year after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, despite the Gulf state’s strong ties to the terror group, and doing so while working in the Prime Minister’s Office.