Netanyahu’s chief of staff reportedly to be questioned over blackmail allegations
Police said seeking to lift gag order in relation to accusation that Tzachi Braverman sought to pressure IDF official to change minutes of meetings linked to October 7 attack
Tzachi Braverman, the chief of staff to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is reportedly set to be questioned by police this week over allegations that he sought to blackmail an IDF official into changing official minutes of wartime discussions.
According to the Kan public broadcaster, Braverman is expected to be interrogated by police before the weekend, in a probe approved by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Attorney Amit Aisman. Police are reportedly planning to request that a gag order on the details of the case be lifted following the questioning.
Braverman has strongly denied the allegations, calling them “severe slander” and “wild incitement,” and threatened to sue Kan if it did not retract the allegations and issue a public apology after the network named him on Sunday in connection with the case. Kan has stood by its reporting.
Netanyahu’s chief of staff has been allegedly accused of gathering a sensitive video recording of an IDF official, obtained from security cameras in the Prime Minister’s Office, in order to coax him into changing protocols of government meetings related to the October 7 Hamas attack. A report earlier this week in Ynet claimed that the attempts to alter the meeting minutes centered on how much knowledge Netanyahu had of the potential for a Hamas attack immediately before October 7, 2023, in particular the activation by terror operatives of dozens of SIM cards.
Netanyahu’s office firmly denied that report, calling it “another complete fabrication that is also part of an unprecedented media witch hunt against the Prime Minister’s Office during wartime, designed to whitewash the grave failures of others on the night of October 7.”
According to a Channel 12 news report on Tuesday, the IDF official at the center of the allegations received a message around 4 a.m. on October 7 — less than three hours before the attack began — relating to the SIM cards. The message, however, noted that security officials did not consider the information to be immediately pressing and therefore it was not passed along to others in the PMO, including then-PMO military secretary Avi Gil. A discussion on the information was reportedly set for later that Saturday morning.
Channel 13 news reported on Monday that officials in the Shin Bet tried to reach Braverman in the hours before the attack to discuss the SIM card activity, something Netanyahu’s office immediately denied.
“It absolutely did not happen,” the PMO said in a statement. “As a general rule, an intelligence update from the Shin Bet to the prime minister goes through the prime minister’s military secretary. In the hours before the October 7 massacre, the chief of staff did not receive any phone calls from anyone.”
Netanyahu has insisted that he was only told about the SIM cards after the attack had begun.
The reported investigation into Braverman comes amid a series of scandals to hit the PMO in recent weeks, which Netanyahu’s office has decried as a politically motivated attack.
Four IDF servicemembers and a spokesman for Netanyahu have been detained as part of a separate investigation into the theft of top-secret army intelligence documents, at least one of which was leaked to the foreign press, possibly for political gain. The Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court said last week that the leak harmed attempts to secure a deal to bring home hostages held by Hamas. At least one of the four soldiers has reportedly been released.
On Sunday, the court extended by four days the detention of Eli Feldstein, a key suspect in the scandal surrounding suspicions that classified documents were mishandled by the Prime Minister’s Office. Feldstein was arrested on October 27. His extended detention will mean he will have been kept in custody for 18 days by the time his current period of detention expires. The police and Shin Bet may request a further extension of his custody on Wednesday.
A lawyer for one of the soldiers suspected of stealing army intelligence and conveying it to the PMO claimed on Tuesday that Feldstein had told the soldier that he passed on the material in question to Netanyahu, who then asked for more.
In a statement to the media on Tuesday implicitly criticizing the police and Shin Bet, Netanyahu’s office alleged that Feldstein and the other suspects were being kept in detention without cause and pressured into accusing the prime minister of crimes.
“We are greatly pained that they are destroying the lives of young men with baseless claims in order to harm right-wing governance,” the PMO said. “In a democratic government people are not detained for 20 days in a basement because of a leak while being prevented from meeting a lawyer for days on end, just in order to extract from them false claims against the prime minister.”
Jeremy Sharon contributed to this report.
