Oded Balaban

The Bild case: what an Israeli classified document was doing in a German newspaper four days after six funerals

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

October 2026

Two hundred and fifty-one people were abducted on October 7, 2023. Of those taken alive, more than forty died in captivity: the Israeli press counts forty-six, CNN counts forty. The difference between the two figures does not alter the question. How many of those deaths were avoidable, and who answers for them.

What the military secretary said

On October 8, 2026, Major General Avi Gil gave a long interview to Channel 12. Gil was Netanyahu’s military secretary until May 2024, that is, the officer who handled the relationship between the prime minister and the army, sitting in that office through almost the whole period under discussion. He is neither a political opponent nor a journalist.

He said the hostages “could have come back before.” Asked whether some of those who died could have been brought back alive, he answered: “We could have.” And asked directly whether Netanyahu chose his own political survival over the hostages’ lives, he replied: “Factually, that is exactly what happened.”

How that accusation was answered

Netanyahu’s response is the most instructive part of the episode. He did not dispute any of the three sentences. He said that Gil “chose not to wake the prime minister up in time,” and that Gil’s remarks were “an attempt to obscure the simple and painful truth about his failure.”

Accused of having put his office ahead of the hostages’ lives, he answered by accusing his accuser over the small hours of October 7. He did not deny the charge; he changed its owner. The opposition called for a criminal investigation and spoke of treason; the Prime Minister’s Office holds that Gil is covering up his own failure.

That move has an improvised version, which is the one given in an interview, and a prepared version, with a stolen document, a censor bypassed and foreign newspapers. The second is in a court file, with dates and with defendants, and it takes up the rest of this article.

The Bild case

What was published

On September 5, 2024, London’s Jewish Chronicle published that Yahya Sinwar was surrounded by a ring of some twenty hostages and planned to smuggle himself and the rest of the Hamas leadership into Egypt, and from there to Iran, through the Philadelphi Corridor. The next day, September 6, Germany’s Bild published a document it presented as secret, describing Hamas’s negotiating strategy: drag it out, apply psychological pressure, do not close. Bild wrote that the paper had been found on a computer “said to belong” to Sinwar, and that he is “said to have” personally approved its content. German marks there, with the verb sollen, that the attribution is somebody else’s. The headline and the framing of the piece present it as revelation.

The two stories appeared between four and six days after the army found the bodies of six murdered hostages in a tunnel in Rafah, and in the middle of the largest demonstrations against the government of the entire war. The Jewish Chronicle piece was withdrawn a few days later.

What the document did not say

Israeli military sources said afterwards that the paper did not come from Sinwar’s computer but from that of a mid-level commander, and that it had been written by lower-level officials. The army itself stated that the information did not reflect the position of Hamas’s senior leadership.

The programme Panorama, on German public television ARD, compared the document with what was published and found that Bild had left out the passages showing that Hamas, at that moment, was seeking a deal. What was cut said the opposite of what the whole paper said.

The published document does contain material that incriminates Hamas and that nobody has denied. It instructs to “continue exerting psychological pressure on the families of the prisoners” so that public pressure on the Israeli government increases. It orders that the press be told the deal is failing because of “Israel’s stubbornness,” and that Hamas must not be “held responsible for the failure of an agreement.” And in the entire text it does not mention the dead Palestinian civilians even once. An effective lie needs a true core. Here the core is large, and that is why it worked.

The difference is one of kind and not of degree. A false story is refuted. A story built out of an authentic document with three lines removed cannot be refuted: you have to obtain the document. And the document was secret. The method protects itself.

Why those two stories and no others

The hostage negotiations were stuck on one precise point, and everyone in Israel knew which: the prime minister’s insistence on keeping control of the Philadelphi Corridor, the strip that separates Gaza from Egypt. The hostages’ families held that this insistence was what was preventing a deal.

Read the two stories now with that in mind. The Jewish Chronicle one says Sinwar planned to escape precisely through Philadelphi. The Bild one says Hamas did not want a deal under any circumstances. Together they sustain exactly the position that was in dispute, and they sustain it at the moment when that position had just cost six lives.

And there is no need to infer it. The Bild piece says so in its last two paragraphs. “Also explosive is what is not in the document: the ‘Philadelphi Corridor,’ around which the negotiations have revolved for weeks, is not mentioned. And yet Hamas is currently acting as if it were its highest priority.” It then explains that the corridor separates Gaza from Egypt, that Netanyahu wants the army to control it, that Hamas demands a withdrawal of troops, and that this is why the United States is pressing Israel.

The article ends there, and the effect of that ending is precise. Netanyahu was being reproached for an insistence on keeping Philadelphi that was blocking the deal and costing the hostages their lives. If Hamas does not really want the corridor and is only pretending to care, then Netanyahu’s demand is blocking nothing, and the six did not die because of it. The Bild reader is left with that conclusion and left with it backed by a classified document of Israeli military intelligence.

The censor

There is one fact that orders the rest and that tends to fall out of the summaries. The document was submitted to the Israeli military censor, and the censor banned its publication.

Banned in Israel, the material came out through Germany and through England. According to the indictment, Eli Feldstein, then a press adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office, bypassed the censor and handed it to foreign media. That manoeuvre is the conduct charged, and it does not depend on whether the content was true or false. A true document does not make the detour legal. That is what having a military censor means: somebody decides what gets published, and the decision is not contested by publishing it in another language.

Who is charged and with what

The material came out of the army’s Intelligence Directorate. It was taken by Ari Rosenfeld, a reservist non-commissioned officer serving there, and according to the published reconstruction it was not one document but three: one on Hamas plans for psychological warfare and two drafted by the Directorate itself.

In November 2024 Feldstein was charged with transmitting classified information with intent to harm the state, a charge that carries a possible life sentence, as well as unlawful possession of classified material and obstruction of justice. Rosenfeld was charged with transmitting classified information, theft by an authorised person, and obstruction.

The indictment also says what for. It holds that Feldstein acted in order to reduce the public criticism directed at Netanyahu after the army found the bodies of the six hostages, and to influence Israeli public opinion on the negotiations, in particular on whether the protests were strengthening Hamas. That is not a reading by the opposition or by the press. It is what the State of Israel asserts in writing before a court: that military intelligence was taken out of a database in order to ease the prime minister’s political cost for six dead.

The same reading circulated in Israel outside the courts, and with fewer circumlocutions. Barak Cohen put it in a public video: the material leaked to Bild had that purpose and no other, to relieve Netanyahu of the reproach over the hostages.

The indictment was later extended to Yonatan Urich, an adviser to Netanyahu, for delivering secret information with intent to harm state security and for destroying evidence. Prosecutors hold that the destruction of evidence consisted in switching phones the day after Feldstein and Rosenfeld were arrested. Urich maintains that he never held or transmitted secret information. The attorney general further announced that she would charge Tzachi Braverman, the prime minister’s chief of staff, with obstruction of justice, fraud and breach of trust, with a hearing pending. In February 2026 the Lod District Court reimposed on him the ban on leaving the country and the ban on working in the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal.

The Tel Aviv District Court set December 15, 2026, for the defendants to respond to the charges, more than two years after the original indictment. The delay comes from a dispute over evidence: the defence holds that it was not given material from the Qatargate case, which overlaps with this one, and Rosenfeld’s lawyers accused the prosecution of hiding relevant and vital material from them. The case remains under partial gag order.

Two questions that are not the same

The objection that circulates most takes the form of a question and sounds reasonable: if what Bild published was true, what is anyone being charged with?

The objection mixes two things. The first is whether the document was authentic and whether it said what it was said to say. It came from another computer, it had been written by other people, and it was published without the lines that contradicted it.

The second is what is charged, and it is independent of the first. Nobody is charged with publishing something false. The charge is taking classified material out of a military intelligence database, bypassing the censor, and handing it to foreign newspapers in order to move domestic public opinion. Had the content been rigorously true, the three verbs would still be there.

There is a third confusion, a finer one. An internal Hamas document proves what somebody in Hamas wrote. It does not prove whose refusal made the negotiation fail. For that you would need the minutes of the negotiation, not the adversary’s memorandum. That one party holds a hard position in writing does not establish that the other was flexible.

The displacement

When the case comes up again, the discussion shifts almost always to the same place: how they got hold of the material, who the mole was, how he was uncovered. It is a real problem and it is the problem of the intelligence services.

The question the displacement leaves behind is a different one. A state burns an intelligence source when what it gets is worth more than the source. It is an arithmetic, and it gets done. What has to be asked is what was obtained here. There was no operational gain, no military advantage, no hostage released. What was obtained was a headline in two foreign newspapers, four days after six funerals.

To discuss the mole instead of the arithmetic, as a friend of mine does, and it is what prompted me to write this article, is to keep the part of the affair that compromises nobody at the top.

What is not proven

Netanyahu is not charged in this case and is not a suspect in it. Feldstein stated publicly that the prime minister knew of the leak and backed it; Netanyahu’s office denies it. That is the assertion of a defendant about the man who appointed him, made while he defends himself, and it is not an established fact.

Nor has the case been tried. There are indictments filed, one extended, another announced with a hearing pending, and no verdict. Everything above is what the prosecution asserts, what the press reported, and what the parties said.

What is established, and disputed by none of the parties, is this. A classified document of the military Intelligence Directorate, whose publication the censor had banned, appeared in a German newspaper and in an English one, cut so that it said the opposite of what it said whole, four days after the bodies of six hostages were found and at the prime minister’s worst political moment.

You do not need to know who ordered it to see what it did. It moved responsibility for those six deaths away from the man it was being demanded of and onto those who had committed them, and it removed from the road the one point at which that responsibility was verifiable, the corridor. An operation is recognised by who gains from it, and here the one who gains has a name and an office.

Two years later, the general who was his military secretary says those hostages could have been brought back alive. The prime minister answers that he did not wake him up in time.

Sources

“2024 Israeli secret document leak scandal”. Wikipedia, consultado el 12 de octubre de 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Israeli_secret_document_leak_scandal

Bild. “Das plant der Hamas-Chef mit den israelischen Geiseln – zum Schaudern!”, 6 de septiembre de 2024. Texto completo recuperado del Internet Archive, copia del 6 de septiembre de 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240906082423/https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/bild-exklusiv-zum-schaudern-das-plant-der-hamas-chef-mit-den-geiseln-66d98503c0fd674dd9f5d092

Cohen, Barak. Video sobre el caso, Facebook, 2026. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1237182778312744/

Israel Policy Forum. “Stolen, Distorted, Leaked: How Netanyahu’s Office May Have Manipulated Classified Intelligence”. https://israelpolicyforum.org/stolen-distorted-leaked-how-netanyahus-office-may-have-manipulated-classified-intelligence-to-prevent-a-hostage-deal/

Peleg, Bar. “How Netanyahu Leveraged Leaked and False ‘Hamas Documents’ as the Hostage Protests Were Surging”. Haaretz, 2 de noviembre de 2024. Text closed on October 12, 2026. The case remains under partial gag order and there is no verdict.

The Jerusalem Post. “Bild leak defendants Urich, Feldstein, Rosenfeld to respond to charges”. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-902484

The Jerusalem Post. “IDF reservist Ari Rosenfeld’s defense claims prosecutors hid key materials in Bild leak case”. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-883731

The Jerusalem Post. “Prosecutors indict Yonatan Urich in classified documents affair”. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-899085

The Times of Israel. “Bild said to have distorted leaked Hamas document to serve ‘Netanyahu’s goals’”. https://www.timesofisrael.com/bild-said-to-have-distorted-leaked-hamas-document-to-serve-netanyahus-goals/

The Times of Israel. “Netanyahu aide leaked stolen doc to try to ‘skew hostage deal debate’ in PM’s favor”. https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-aide-leaked-stolen-doc-to-try-to-skew-hostage-deal-debate-in-pms-favor/

The Times of Israel. “Netanyahu aide, IDF reservist indicted in security documents leak scandal”. https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-aide-idf-reservist-indicted-in-security-documents-leak-scandal/

The Times of Israel. “Netanyahu chief of staff to be indicted for obstruction of justice, pending hearing”. https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-chief-of-staff-to-be-indicted-for-obstruction-of-justice-pending-hearing/

The Times of Israel. “PM’s aide Urich charged with leaking classified info with intent to harm state security”. https://www.timesofisrael.com/pms-aide-urich-charged-with-leaking-classified-info-with-intent-to-harm-state-security/

The Times of Israel. “Senior Netanyahu aide Urich to be charged with security offenses over Bild leak”. https://www.timesofisrael.com/senior-netanyahu-aide-urich-to-be-charged-with-security-offenses-over-bild-leak/

Ynet. “The leak, the publication, the arrest: Step by step”. https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1iueawgyl

Text closed on October 12, 2026. The case remains under partial gag order and there is no verdict.