MADRID 24 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced this Saturday the ongoing investigation against members of the Prime Minister’s Office for alleged leaks as a “witch hunt” with the “clear” objective of harming him and his supporters.
“Unfortunately, this current witch hunt is having very serious consequences, not only for the staff in my office, but also for the young people whose families are being destroyed,” the president lamented in a video published on his account on the social network. X and picked up by ‘The Jerusalem Post’.
Netanyahu has referred to the accusations presented the day before against his advisor Eli Feldstein and a non-commissioned officer of the Israeli Army for the alleged dissemination of classified documents “that harmed the war effort and reduced the chances of success of a hostage agreement.” “The objective is clear: to harm me and harm you, the citizens of Israel who support me,” he declared.
The prime minister has defended Feldstein’s innocence, claiming that he is “a passionate and patriotic Zionist” who would not do “something intentionally to harm the security of the state.”
“It doesn’t take a genius to understand why these leaks were not investigated. The public is not stupid. And now we have a single investigation into a leak related to a document that exposes Hamas’ strategy to divide Israeli society and put pressure on me to me and the Government to surrender to the will of Hamas,” he insisted.
Without going into more details, Netanyahu has pointed out that “this is not the first time that critical information has not been provided” and that, however, “only here has an investigation been initiated.” “Not just an investigation, but accusations of document falsification, blackmail and threats in the Prime Minister’s Office, things that never happened,” he added.
This statement comes after the Israeli Prosecutor’s Office explained in detail this Friday the reasons why it had decided to charge Eli Feldstein, one of the advisors in the prime minister’s office, for leaking classified information to foreign media about the negotiations for release the hostages held by Hamas.
Feldstein is suspected of “trying to influence the political debate over the hostages” by leaking material to the German newspaper Bild and demonstrating that the Islamist movement Hamas “was not willing to reach an agreement to release the hostages in Gaza.”
In this context, the Prosecutor’s Office saw no mitigating factor in Feldstein believing that he was acting to defend the Israeli State, according to the explanation published by the Israeli media. “What he did was instead publish classified information for his own benefit, but in any case the motive is irrelevant: he should have been aware of the potential consequences of his actions and, being aware of the censorship of the documents, showed that he understood the possibility of harming the Israeli State,” he concluded.
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