Report: Urich was paid over $500,000 for pro-Qatar work, police suspect

Jonatan Urich, a top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was paid NIS 1.9 million (over $500,000 at 2024 exchange rates and some $600,000 at current rates) between January and September 2024 for what police suspect was work on the pro-Qatar influence campaign, for which Urich is under investigation, Channel 12 reports.

The report followed the network reporting earlier this evening that Netanyahu secretly met one-on-one with the most senior Israeli on Qatar’s payroll in the summer of 2024.

The money was transferred to Urich by a former Netanyahu adviser, Yisrael Einhorn, the report says. Israel Police in January declared the Serbia-based Einhorn a “fugitive criminal” and said there was an arrest warrant out for him. Einhorn, like Urich, is a suspect in both the Qatargate influence campaign case and the Bild leaked documents scandal.

According to a Channel 12 report last week, Urich has admitted to investigators that he received “hundreds of thousands of shekels” from Qatar, and that he had no moral qualms working for Doha both before and after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack. That earlier report did not cite the alleged sums involved or precisely when Urich was allegedly paid.

In response to this evening’s reports, former prime minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the opposition B’Yachad party, steps up his denunciations of Netanyahu over the affair, demanding that the prime minister “explain to the public his connection to Qatar, why he advanced Qatar’s interests in wartime, and why the person closest to him, even now, is a Qatari agent who carried out the gravest act of treason in the history of the state.”

The answers to all the questions, which Netanyahu “is trying to hide,” Bennett vows, will be uncovered “in the state commission of inquiry that we will establish” following Tuesday’s election.