Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, has been detained and questioned by police over alleged attempts to interfere with a probe into the leak of a classified document to German tabloid Bild.
Braverman’s questioning lasted around 13 hours on Sunday, the Times of Israel reported. He was released on restrictive conditions including a 15-day ban on attending the Prime Minister’s Office and a 30-day ban on leaving the country.
The restrictions could delay Braverman’s entry to the post of Israeli ambassador to the UK, for which he was approved last year.
In September 2024, Bild published a top-secret military intelligence paper, presenting it as proof that Palestinian armed group Hamas was not interested in reaching a hostage deal with Israel.
Netanyahu’s former spokesman, Eli Feldstein, who was arrested in October 2024 and charged with leaking the paper to the tabloid, said in an interview last month that the prime minister supported the attempts to use the document to reinforce the public argument that more pressure on Hamas was needed.
Feldstein also claimed that Braverman was aware of a covert probe into the Bild leak months before it made headlines and had assured him that he would be able to “shut it down.”
According to Channel 12, the two had a brief face-to-face during the chief of staff’s questioning on Sunday. Braverman’s lawyer later said his client “answered all the investigators’ questions, and denied every invented version of events put forward by the defendant [Feldstein].”
Netanyahu’s Likud party called Braverman’s interrogation a “campaign of persecution” and a “phishing attempt” against the prime minister and his allies.
Opposition Democrats party lawmaker Gilad Kariv argued that anyone who believes that the chief of staff could have acted without Netanyahu’s approval is “living in an illusion,” insisting that the prime minister himself should be interrogated rather than Braverman.
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The Bild scandal comes amid a sharp decline in support for Netanyahu’s government, with a poll published by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) in late December suggesting that it is trusted only by a quarter of Israeli Jews and just over 17% of Israeli Arabs.
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