Report: Theft of classified docs, their transfer to ‘people in PMO’ was allegedly ‘systematic’

Investigators probing the theft of classified intelligence documents from the IDF and their transfer to people in the Prime Minister’s Office suspect that the theft of such documents was “systematic,” Channel 12 reports.

It says a document allegedly leaked to Germany’s Bild newspaper, which reported on it in September, “was not the only document” taken and conveyed to “people in Netanyahu’s office.”

“There were apparently other classified documents” that were accessed and conveyed in this way, Channel 12 says.

A spokesman for Netanyahu, Eli Feldstein, was named by a judge yesterday as the central suspect in the case. Netanyahu is not a suspect in the case.

The ongoing investigation, which involves the police, IDF, and Shin Bet, is focused on “grave leaks of classified information from the IDF’s Intelligence Directorate to unauthorized recipients,” the TV report says.

The Shin Bet suspects that an “infrastructure” was put in place that was able to access “all the classified material held by Military Intelligence,” and that “it extracted — and may have intended to continue to extract in the future — classified material that could expose the capabilities of the entire intelligence community” — encompassing the IDF, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad.

The exposure of this material — as happened with the Bild article — while evading military censorship, endangers the lives of IDF soldiers and harms efforts to free the hostages, the TV report says, citing what it says is the assessment in the defense establishment and of the investigators of the case.

This ongoing danger to soldiers and to the efforts to free the hostages “is the heart of the matter,” the report says.

The questions of what the suspects intended to do with the material, who knew what they were doing, and who gave the instructions are also all currently being probed, it says.