Eisenkot slams Netanyahu’s ‘deafening silence’ on Urich’s work for Qatar, says PM owes Israel answers

14 October 2026, 10:57 pm

2 Edit

Yashar party chairman Gadi Eisenkot at a youth conference at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem, October 11, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Responding to tonight’s report that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top aide Jonatan Urich met at least twice in Europe with a senior Qatari official in the summer of 2024, opposition frontrunner Gadi Eisenkot denounces Netanyahu’s deafening silence over the affair and says it indicates the prime minister’s “full complicity in Urich’s actions. Netanyahu owes the people of Israel answers,” he says.

Urich, who is suspected of working for pay within the Prime Minister’s Office to promote the image of Qatar, reportedly met with Ali al-Thawadi, a Qatari minister considered a close ally of the ruling emir. The meetings were reportedly not part of any official Israeli government business.

Urich has been charged in a separate case with disseminating classified IDF intelligence information with intent to harm state security in the Bild leak affair

“The details emerging in recent days illustrate just how deep and rotten the failure is,” Eisenkot charges, noting that “the man closest to the prime minister” is also accused of having endangered a highly sensitive intelligence source regarding the issue of Israeli hostages in the Bild leak affair.

Urich, he continues, also “worked in the service of Qatar, during wartime, from the office of the prime minister of Israel. All this, during the toughest war in our history, which began with the gravest failure we have ever known, at a time when our finest sons and daughters were laying down their lives” in the defense of Israel.

“Netanyahu’s pathetic excuses of ‘I didn’t know’ and his fairy tales that ‘they didn’t wake me up’ fool no one,” Eisenkot continues.

“Netanyahu abandoned Israel’s security and desecrated the Holy of Holies,” the Yashar leader charges, referring to the inner sanctum at the Prime Minister’s Office, where Urich still works.

“The people of Israel will put an end to this in 13 days at the ballot box, and will elect honest, responsible, and worthy leadership,” Eisenkot declares. “I will always act solely in Israel’s national interests. I commit to this.”