Court upholds police request to ban Netanyahu’s chief of staff from PM’s office

The Lod District Court ruled on Monday in favor of an appeal by the police to bar Tzachi Braverman, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff, from the Prime Minister’s Office due to an ongoing police investigation into Braverman on suspicion of obstruction of justice.

Judge Jacob Spasser ruled that Braverman cannot be present in the Prime Minister’s Office or the IDF’s headquarters at the Kirya complex in Tel Aviv until January 26.

Spasser also prohibited Braverman from contacting a list of people connected to, but not necessarily suspects in, the Bild leaked documents case — including Netanyahu himself, the prime minister’s military secretary, key suspects Jonatan Urich and Eli Feldstein, and various other officials in the Prime Minister’s Office — until February 10.

The judge ruled, however, that the restriction on Braverman leaving the country could be shortened to last until January 30, whereas police had sought to keep it in place until February 9.

The affair revolves around the allegedly unlawful removal of sensitive and classified documents from IDF Military Intelligence by a reservist NCO, Ari Rosenfeld, and the leaking of one of those documents to the German Bild newspaper by Feldstein.

The leak was part of an effort by the prime minister’s aides, allegedly including Urich as well, to defend Netanyahu’s position that only further military pressure would lead to the release of the hostages being held in Gaza, in the face of a severe public backlash to the murder of six hostages by Hamas at the end of August 2024.

Braverman was detained and questioned last Sunday on suspicion of obstruction of justice over what has been called the “night meeting,” in which he met Feldstein in the middle of the night in an underground parking lot at the IDF’s Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv in late September 2024.

According to Feldstein, Braverman had called him there to tell him he was aware of a military investigation into the leaked documents. Feldstein claims that Braverman asked him whether he was familiar with any figures on a list of six names Braverman had been given — apparently additional suspects in the military investigation — and told Feldstein he could “quash” the probe.

Judge Spasser’s decision overturned, for the most part, the decision last week of Judge Menachem Mizrahi, the president of the Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court, who said that there was “no evidentiary, substantive, proportionate, and practical justification” for the restrictions on Braverman and other suspects in the affair requested by the police.

Spasser wrote, by contrast, in his Monday ruling that “there is reasonable suspicion, at a substantive level, that justifies the request.”

He said that the initial 15-day ban on Braverman entering the Prime Minister’s Office as requested by the police was in fact “proportional,” despite Mizrachi’s opposition to such a restriction, and found the ban on Braverman contacting people connected to the case to be “necessary.”

The ruling is the latest in a long sequence of decisions in which the Lod District Court has overturned Mizrachi’s rulings in the case, while police themselves have frequently criticized the judge for the manner in which he has addressed their requests.

Earlier on Monday, Urich, a senior aide to Netanyahu, was summoned for questioning under caution by police over the investigation into the obstruction of justice suspicions against Braverman and the “night meeting” at the IDF headquarters.

According to a report by the Kan public broadcaster, Urich told investigators during his interrogation that his comment to Feldstein over WhatsApp that “the boss is satisfied” after Bild published its story about the leaked document could have referred to Braverman.

Until now it had been assumed that Urich had been referring to Netanyahu.

According to a transcript of the interrogation published by Kan, Urich was once again evasive in answering questions from the investigators, gave laconic noncommittal answers, and was essentially uncooperative.

At one point Urich insisted, however, that “I did not talk about Bild with the prime minister.”

An apparently skeptical investigator challenged him, asking, “Are you sure?” to which Urich responded, “I’m not sure who the boss is here,” in reference to the WhatsApp message to Feldstein, and then when asked again said, “Maybe [it was] Tzachi [Braverman].”

The Bild leak investigation is one of several affairs to embroil aides to Netanyahu in recent months. Urich and Feldstein have also been arrested over the so-called Qatargate affair, in which they are suspected 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, all while working as aides to Netanyahu.