Supreme Court justice Yosef Elron accepts appeal against suspects’ release to house arrest, acknowledges ‘very unusual’ decision to override district court’s rejection of appeal
Eli Feldstein, a spokesman who worked with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the central suspect in the PMO security documents leak scandal, will remain in custody until 6:00 p.m. on Sunday evening, Supreme Court justice Yosef Elron ruled in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Feldstein and an IDF reservist who is also a suspect in the case had been expected to be released to house arrest on Friday following a ruling by the Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court, but their release was pushed off until Sunday after an appeal against the decision was filed at the Lod District Court by the Israel Police and the Shin Bet, which argued that Feldstein posed a danger to the public.
The appeal was rejected by the court, at which point Supreme Court justices agreed to hear it on Saturday night.
Prior to the hearing, Elron warned that there would need to be an extremely compelling reason for the Supreme Court to overturn the previous rulings of the magistrate and district courts.
In his ruling, however, the justice wrote that the appeal was accepted amid “very unusual circumstances,” and as such, the detention of the two suspects would be extended until Sunday evening.“I scheduled an urgent hearing on the request for an appeal, during which I heard extensively from the parties’ lawyers and held a hearing behind closed doors in the presence of the relevant security officials,” Elron wrote, adding that he “also reviewed the large amount of confidential material that was submitted,” before deciding to accept the appeal.
Feldstein, a Netanyahu aide who had previously served in the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Unit, is suspected of having worked with four intelligence soldiers to steal classified material from the IDF. He is reportedly suspected of leaking material from one document to the German publication Bild, whose publication is said to have harmed efforts to free Israeli hostages in Gaza and exposed Israeli intelligence sources.
He has been held in detention since October 27, part of that time without access to a lawyer. Of the four soldiers, two have been released to house arrest. The third, a reservist, remained in custody alongside Feldstein.
On Wednesday, the reservist’s attorney Micha Fettman, said his client had sent Netanyahu classified material against protocol, believing it would facilitate a hostage deal. Fettman said that the transfer was done via Feldstein, who told the reservist that Netanyahu had received the documents, wanted more, and would “clear out an entire day” for the matter.
Fettman reiterated his earlier arguments during the late-night Supreme Court hearing and insisted that his client had undergone a Shin Bet polygraph to prove that he was not lying about the circumstances in which he transferred the documents to Feldstein, Hebrew media outlet Ynet reported.
“My client had no intention of harming the hostage deal,” Fettman told the court. “He legally held a document and handed it over to the prime minister who is allowed to handle it. Feldstein presented himself as having security clearance and as a representative of the prime minister.”
Fettman’s claims have appeared to be at odds with Netanyahu’s reported statement in a closed forum last week that he had no prior knowledge of the scandal and that “Eli Feldstein acted of his own accord.”
Meanwhile, Feldstein’s defense attorney Oded Saburai demanded to know what basis there was for the claim that Feldstein would pose a danger to society if released to house arrest, Ynet reported, and claimed that Feldstein had believed that he was “helping to free the hostages and not the other way around.”
State prosecutor Adi Arad rejected the claims that the two suspects believed they were helping the hostages, and argued to the court that the evidence “presented an entirely different picture to the portrayal from the defense attorneys.”
“They acted for many months to release classified materials for ideological reasons, and caused a significant risk to the security of the state,” Arad said. “We believe that there is no sufficient alternative to detention in light of the perceived danger.”
Arad also pointed to the ongoing investigation into top Netanyahu adviser Jonathan Urich as a reason to extend the detention of the two suspects.
Urich was questioned under caution on Friday in connection to the leaking of classified documents to Bild.
According to Arad, new avenues of investigation were opened up following Urich’s testimony, the findings of which had not been presented to the Lod district court when it rejected the appeal to keep Feldstein in custody.
According to reports, indictments are expected to be filed against Feldstein and the IDF reservist in the coming days, at which point the police will request to keep Feldstein in detention until the end of the proceedings.
The alleged intelligence theft is one of several security-related scandals that have roiled Netanyahu’s office in recent weeks.
Top aides to the premier are also accused of collecting embarrassing footage of then-defense minister Yoav Gallant in an altercation with a security guard and of a top officer in the PMO’s military secretariat in a clandestine relationship; and of trying to tamper with minutes of wartime discussions involving Netanyahu and/or PMO officials before and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre in southern Israel, including on the night of October 6-7, 2023, hours before the Hamas attack.
As reported by The Times of Israel