On 9 November, Israel’s highest circulation Hebrew-language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that staff from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office had used sensitive personal information on a senior officer to gain access to and alter confidential documents in the military secretariat.

The reports appear to unearth another link in the scandal involving leaks of genuine and fake classified documents to Germany’s Bild newspaper and the UK Jewish Chronicle. Some of the documents in the Israeli newspaper’s report involved confidential minutes of high-level meetings related to Israel’s preparations for the case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging it with genocide.

The probable purpose of altering them was to cover up aspects of the war crimes and crimes against humanity that Israel has been committing in Gaza for over a year since the beginning of its war on Gaza.

On 2 November, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a timeline demonstrating how leaked information planted in the foreign media had been used to further the schemes of the far-right Israeli Netanyahu government.

This showed that on 1 September Israel announced that six of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza were killed by Hamas, triggering a surge in protests in Israel demanding that the government reach a deal to secure the release of the hostages.

The following day, Netanyahu held a press conference claiming Hamas had planned to smuggle the hostages out of Gaza to Iran using the Philadelphi Corridor in Gaza. Several days later, the Jewish Chronicle published a fake report to that effect. The next day, Bild published a “leak” ostensibly outlining the Hamas strategy to build up pressure on the Israeli government over the hostages. Two days later, Netanyahu cited the Bild article, saying that the demonstrators are “falling into a Hamas trap.”

Many suspects have been arrested in the investigations that the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet launched after the leaks were published in the foreign news outlets. The main suspect is Eli Feldstein, a member of Netanyahu’s staff and a former aide to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Four military officers are also among the suspects.

According to Yedioth Ahronoth, Tzachi Braverman, chief of staff of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, is the main suspect in the case involving the alleged extortion of a senior officer in the military secretariat.

It is believed that staff in the office of the prime minister or other senior officials in the Netanyahu government used agents within the Israeli army to steal classified documents that they could then use or manipulate to serve political ends. According to The Times of Israel, investigators believe the theft of classified files from the army’s databases and their transfer to persons in the Prime Minister’s Office is “systematic.”

Shin Bet believes that an entire “infrastructure” has been created to access military intelligence classified materials and that this has extracted and would have continued to extract classified materials that could jeopardise the operations of all branches of Israeli intelligence, including military intelligence Shin Bet and Mossad.

The newspaper cited investigators as saying that the publication of such sensitive intelligence in the foreign media presents a “continuous threat” to the lives of the hostages in Gaza and Israeli soldiers and hampers the prospects for negotiating the hostages’ release.

An unnamed source involved in the investigation cited by Israel’s Channel 12 TV station said that the report that appeared in Bild in September had undermined Israeli intelligence, including by revealing confidential sources.

“Israeli sources suggest that the investigations will progress rapidly in the coming days,” political analyst Nidal Khadra told Al-Ahram Weekly, adding that senior Israeli officials familiar with the investigation had described Netanyahu’s office as a “crime organisation.”

Khadra believes that the situation is getting tougher for Netanyahu because as the scandals surrounding his office multiply Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara has approved an investigation into Netanyahu himself in relation to his personal responsibility for the security and intelligence failures that facilitated the 7 October attacks last year.

A spokesperson for Netanyahu’s office denied allegations regarding the extortion of the military officer to obtain and alter confidential documents. However, this will likely do nothing to alleviate the widespread anger that is building up against Netanyahu, especially after he fired Defence Minister Yoav Gallant last week, political analyst Mohsen Abu Ramadan told the Weekly.

However, the extortion scandal involving Netanyahu’s office “will still not be enough to oust him from power, given how he holds all the strings in his hands and has managed to overcome many previous crises,” Abu Ramadan said.

He added that Netanyahu’s chances of surviving the crisis are further increased by the weakness of the current lame duck administration in Washington. The Biden administration “has not exerted any serious pressure on Netanyahu during the more than year-long genocide in Gaza, even though it knew that the Democrats would pay the price with Harris’ defeat against Trump in the elections,” Abu Ramadan said.

“Netanyahu knows the Biden administration will continue to give him a free hand and that none of its feigned admonishments or threats to pressure him need to be taken seriously.”

Taking advantage of the absence of any outside pressures, Netanyahu will likely manoeuvre to tighten his control over the Israeli military and security establishment and the judiciary, Abu Ramadan said. He will also seize the opportunity to dismiss the attorney general, who had just authorised an investigation into him in connection with 7 October.

“Netanyahu’s government coalition, the weak opposition, and the absence of any external pressures will help him overcome the crisis,” Abu Ramadan said. “He will continue to use the rubric of an ‘existential war’ on multiple fronts to outmanoeuvre the opposition and eliminate obstacles to his drive to monopolise power, which had triggered widespread protests in Israel even before the genocidal war on Gaza.”

Netanyahu’s office is being investigated in connection with four cases, not three, political analyst Tamara Haddad told the Weekly. “What is involved here are not so much security leaks as scandals that will affect Netanyahu’s reputation first and foremost. This is clear from the fact that the Israeli attorney general opened investigations into him based on suspicions that he had played a part in these leaks,” she said.

This is more of a criminal matter than a security matter, she said, noting that Netanyahu could face serious felony charges, since the leaks involved sensitive intelligence information that when made public could potentially harm national security, military operations, and the safety of the individuals involved.

“The theft of documents is another criminal case on top of the others. It offers mounting evidence that Netanyahu has a ring of spies working for him in the military to procure information that he then manipulates to sabotage prisoner-exchange deals and to persuade public opinion that he is not the one responsible for the collapsed negotiations,” she said.

As for the fourth case, according to Haddad it revolves around Gallant’s dismissal. Tensions between Netanyahu and the former defence minister date back long before the latter was sacked. On 12 October 2023, Netanyahu had security guards prevent Gallant from entering the room where a high-level meeting was taking place, leading to a physical altercation that was documented on video.

“That incident reflects how deep the differences are between Netanyahu and Gallant over a range of issues from the conscription law to negotiating a hostage-exchange deal and a plan for the ‘day after’ in Gaza,” Haddad said.

“Netanyahu’s position on all these issues is informed by his own personal interests. That is why he fired Gallant and replaced him with Yisrael Katz, a Netanyahu loyalist.”

Haddad does not believe that Gallant’s dismissal will have a major effect on Israeli public opinion, but “it could affect the operations of the Israeli army in Southern Lebanon and Gaza if a sense of resentment spreads among the troops because of the government’s refusal to amend the current conscription law that exempts the Haredim from the draft.”

The scandals “give the impression of a society in which security, safety, and basic trust are completely lacking.”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly