“Eli Feldstein never served as the Prime Minister’s spokesperson and was not employed in the Prime Minister’s Office,” Likud party spokesman Guy Levy said in a post on X/Twitter on Friday evening. “Contrary to false claims.”
Levy added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “had almost no contact” with Feldstein, saying that he was “employed by the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, and after his employment there ended, he worked as an external consultant for the National Public Diplomacy Array.”
The spokesman made the statement in response to Feldstein giving his first public interview on Monday to KAN News since he was accused over the Bild and Qatargate cases, where he said that Netanyahu demanded that the topic of responsibility for the October 7 attack be “erased from the public discourse.”
Levy: Netanyahu refused to issue words of praise for Qatar
In Friday evening’s announcement, Levy added that “from the beginning of the war, the prime minister issued sharp statements and briefings against Qatar. Senior officials occasionally tried to insert words of praise for Qatar into the prime minister’s speeches, and Netanyahu firmly refused.”
He added that Netanyahu ordered the Israeli strike on Qatar, while claiming that there are extensive ties between Doha and former senior officers, left-wing officials, and members of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
Levy also spoke on another former spokesman for the prime minister, Yonatan Urich, and said in his statement that “the court has already spoken clearly: there was no offense committed, and there is no affair. In other words, not ‘Qatargate,’ but ‘Qatarfake.’”
The spokesman concluded his statement by saying Netanyahu “rejects all attempts to attribute foreign motives or illegal actions to him.”
In Monday’s KAN News interview, Feldstein also said that the responsibility issue caused rifts between Netanyahu’s office and former IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, who believed the office was working against the army and that he himself was being held responsible for the matter.
Feldstein also mentioned that Netanyahu’s relationship with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was bad, and that the prime minister despised the two of them.
In an interview broadcast, Feldstein also described his sense of loneliness and the rupture that formed between him and the Prime Minister’s Office staff following his arrest.
According to him, for many days he believed that the arrest was only a temporary detention and that “any moment now they’re coming to release me,” but he later realized that he had been left alone, without backing from his colleagues in the PMO.
Feldstein is currently accused of leaking sensitive information to the German newspaper Bild while working in the Prime Minister’s Office, and of being among those who received payments from Qatar in the Qatargate scandal.
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett said that Netanyahu “has violated his most basic duty and loyalty to Israel’s security and cannot serve as prime minister for even one more minute. This is the most toxic betrayal Israel has ever known.”
Tobias Holcman and Avi Solomon contributed to this report.