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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing a growing political scandal over leaks of classified information that the families of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza say undermined support for efforts to free them.
An Israeli court last week partially lifted a gag order on an investigation into the leaks, as part of which a media adviser to Netanyahu was among five people arrested. The leaks related to now-discredited Hamas plans that appeared to support Netanyahu’s claims that the militant group, rather than the Israeli leader, was the obstacle to a deal to release the hostages.
On Tuesday, protesters blocked a busy highway in Tel Aviv, Israel’s business hub, expressing outrage at the prime minister over the leaks. They demanded a deal to end the war in Gaza and free the 101 Israeli hostages still in captivity in the enclave.
“This week, the real war objectives of Netanyahu were revealed: blocking the hostage deal, launching an incitement campaign against families fighting to bring their loved ones home and gravely harming the security of the state,” said the Women’s Protest for the Return of the Hostages, one of the groups involved.
Netanyahu’s office has said that no one from his office has been arrested or interrogated, and rejected suggestions that the publication of the information — in articles in the UK’s Jewish Chronicle and Germany’s Bild — did any harm to the hostage negotiations or to Israel’s national security.
However, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents relatives of those held by Hamas, expressed “outrage and deep concern at discovering” that officials had allegedly “worked to undermine public support for the hostage deal”.
Opposition politicians have also seized on the allegations to lambast Netanyahu. Yair Lapid, head of the largest opposition party, Yesh Atid, said the leaks “ought to horrify every Israeli”, and demanded that the investigation probe whether Netanyahu himself was aware of them.
“[Netanyahu] is claiming he doesn’t know what his own office is doing while Israel is in an existential war,” Lapid said on Sunday. “If that is true, he is unfit . . . to lead the state of Israel in the most difficult war in its history.”
Meanwhile, Benny Gantz, head of the centre-right National Unity party, said the leak of the classified materials “requires investigation and clarification to the end”.
“If sensitive security information is stolen, and becomes a tool in a political survival campaign — this is not only a criminal offence, it is a national crime,” he said.
The scandal burst into the public domain last week after the gag order was partially lifted. The presiding judge, Menachem Mizrahi, said the leaks could have harmed Israel’s ability to extricate the hostages still held in Gaza.
The leaks cited documents that claimed Hamas planned to divide Israeli society with propaganda efforts about the hostages. They also suggested the militant group wanted to smuggle the hostages to Egypt via tunnels under the so-called Philadelphi corridor, which separates Gaza from Egypt.
The stories appeared at the end of August and beginning of September when Netanyahu was under intense pressure from mass street protests to accept a deal to end the war and free the hostages. Israeli intelligence believes about a third of the hostages are already dead.
However, Netanyahu refused to give up control of the Philadelphi corridor, which many regional diplomats believe was a big reason for the negotiations failing.
The Israeli military briefed reporters after the stories ran that the documents were written by a low-level Hamas official, were old and not indicative of the army’s intelligence about Hamas’s strategy.
Support for Netanyahu’s Likud party, which collapsed in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, has begun to recover in recent months.
Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster and political analyst, said that despite Netanyahu’s record of riding out numerous political storms, the latest scandal could hurt him politically given the widespread desire in Israel for a deal to bring home the hostages.
But she added that if — as scheduled — elections are not held until 2026, it could prove moot. “The question as always is when do these processes get put to the test,” she said. “Because even if people have reached a breaking point right now, who knows what will happen in two years.”