Soldier suspected of intel theft was told Netanyahu got his material, wanted more – lawyer
Main suspect Feldstein told soldier PM would ‘clear out an entire day’ for the stolen material, attorney Fettman says; PM’s office implies suspects being pressured to implicate him
A lawyer for one of several soldiers suspected of stealing army intelligence and conveying it to the Prime Minister’s Office said Tuesday that Eli Feldstein, the main suspect in the case, told the soldier that he passed on the material to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who then asked for more.
Feldstein told the soldier, who has not been named, “I transferred [the material] to the prime minister, and the prime minister wants more,” lawyer Micha Fettman said on Army Radio. “He’s clearing a full day to handle this matter.”
Fettman’s comments appeared to be at odds with Netanyahu’s statement in a closed forum last week, according to Hebrew media reports, that he had no prior knowledge of the scandal and that “Eli Feldstein acted of his own accord.”
Hours after Fettman’s interview, Netanyahu’s office issued a statement implying the suspects in the case were being pressured to implicate the premier.
“We are greatly pained that they are destroying the lives of young men with baseless claims in order to harm right-wing governance,” read the statement.
It decried the suspects’ long detention without seeing a lawyer and repeated the premier’s accusation that other, unspecified “criminal leaks” have exposed sensitive information to Iran and not been probed.
The statement mentioned neither Feldstein nor Fettman.
Feldstein, a Netanyahu aide who had served in the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Unit, is suspected of having worked with four intelligence soldiers to steal top-secret intelligence and leak it to the foreign press in a distorted manner that would dovetail with the premier’s talking points against a hostage deal with Hamas. He has been held in detention since October 27, part of that time without access to a lawyer, and his remand will be reviewed again on Wednesday. Three of the four soldiers are also understood to still be held, while one has been released. A gag order covers some aspects of the case.
Fettman told Army Radio that his client, a noncommissioned officer serving as a reservist in an intelligence unit, was given Feldstein’s number after deciding, against protocol, to forward material directly to the Prime Minister’s Office rather than through its military secretariat.
Fettman said his client had no former acquaintance with Feldstein. The attorney would not divulge who had given his client Feldstein’s number, saying that the interlocutor’s identity was part of the investigative materials.
Previous reports have said Feldstein had prior acquaintance with one of the soldiers who are suspects in the case.
According to Fettman, his client thought the transfer would facilitate a deal with Hamas to bring home the hostages. The reservist felt a need to “break out” of the military hierarchy because of past instances in which it had shut down intelligence analysts who offered divergent views, he said.
“The cooperation he got and the answers he got [from Feldstein] made him believe that the information had reached the place he aimed for,” Fettman said.
While he acknowledged that the soldier may have acted illegally, Fettman said his client’s motives were pure, and bemoaned the fact that his client — who is married and has a 2-year-old daughter — has been detained for 18 days, during the first 10 of which he was denied access to legal counsel.
“Even if he made some relatively technical blunder,” Fettman said, “whoever made sure to leak [the material] did something much more serious.”
Fettman had briefly been part of the defense team in Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trials, but quit amid reported disagreements with another lawyer, days after the premier was prohibited from paying his legal fees with funds from a foreign benefactor.
The alleged intelligence theft is one of several security-related scandals that have roiled Netanyahu’s office recently. Top aides to the premier are also accused of collecting embarrassing footage of then-defense minister Yoav Gallant in an altercation with a security guard and of a top officer in the PMO’s military secretariat in a clandestine relationship; and of trying to tamper with minutes of wartime discussions involving Netanyahu and/or PMO officials before and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre in southern Israel, including on the night of October 6-7, 2023, hours before the Hamas attack.
