Israel’s Qatargate Scandal
As a young man, Yisrael Einhorn was a mainstay of Tel Aviv’s underground night life—an ebullient music producer and performer who billed himself as D.J. Cock and went around town costumed as a golden penis. It was fun, and sometimes he made some money, but over time the club life began to wear thin. He found a second career in advertising, then got into politics. In 2017, he founded a strategic-consulting company called Perception and went on to help run five election campaigns for Israel’s Likud Party. He became known for his close ties to the Party’s leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While Einhorn built his influence in Israeli politics, his company also secured a lucrative foreign client: Qatar, the tiny Gulf emirate that is among the world’s richest countries. In 2022, Qatar was preparing to host the FIFA World Cup, and its communication ministry wanted to spread the idea that Qatar was a Jewish-friendly place. (Never mind that even the grade-school textbooks there were rife with antisemitism.) Perception set up a dummy news site and created fake social-media accounts highlighting the tournament’s amenities, which included kosher food in stadiums. After the games were over, Qatar still found the relationship with Perception valuable: it continued sending payments of forty-five thousand dollars a month through a third-party company.
In December, 2023, Einhorn went to the Ritz in London to discuss a new opportunity. His host was Jay Footlik, another ex-performer who’d had a propitious second career. Footlik grew up an aspiring actor in Skokie, Illinois, and as a young man he landed bit parts in such films as “Teen Wolf” and “Iron Eagle.” Later on, he, too, turned to politics: he worked on a campaign for Bill Clinton and served as a Middle East adviser to John Kerry. Since 2019, Footlik had been a registered lobbyist for Qatar; his company, Third Circle, was paid half a million dollars a year to enhance the emirate’s reputation among the D.C. élite.
At the Ritz, Footlik told Einhorn about Qatar’s P.R. objective. It wanted to be known as a peacemaker in the region. Both men knew that this would require a radical change in Israeli public opinion. It had been only two months since Hamas militants swept into Israel, killing some twelve hundred people and touching off a vicious assault on Gaza. Israelis, freshly traumatized, viewed Qatar as their enemy’s patron.
Since 2018, Qatar had been transferring as much as thirty million dollars a month to Gaza. The money was nominally to pay civil servants and prop up infrastructure in a territory sequestered by an Israeli blockade, but many observers agreed that Hamas diverted a significant sum to its military wing. “The Qatari grant is the main artery of the Hamas movement,” a Hamas leader told Qatar’s foreign minister in 2019, according to papers later seized by Israel. The October 7th attacks revealed what Qatar’s money had helped buy: Hamas forces assembled in a vast system of tunnels outfitted with ventilation systems, surveillance cameras, and communications networks; they emerged wearing body cameras and carrying antitank missiles.
When Footlik and Einhorn met in London, the war in Gaza had been intensifying. Strikes by the Israel Defense Forces had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, while Hamas continued to hold more than a hundred Israeli hostages. Qatar wanted to intervene. The emirate had recently negotiated a ceasefire between the two sides, and, though the deal collapsed after a week, the Qataris thought that they could broker a more comprehensive agreement—as long as Israel and the U.S. accepted them as mediators.
Footlik and Einhorn began to plot a campaign to transform Qatar’s reputation. In the coming months, they are alleged to have worked with two aides in Netanyahu’s office on a scheme for which they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. The aides arranged press junkets, invented sources, and planted stories that brazenly inverted popular views. Hamas leaders were being sheltered in Qatar—but only at the insistence of Israel and the United States. Egypt was Israel’s longtime peace partner—but it couldn’t be trusted to handle the negotiations. As the stories gained currency, Einhorn wrote in a celebratory text that they were “giving birth to reality.”
From Qatar’s perspective, the campaign was a success: the Qataris became crucial players in peace talks over Gaza. Within Israel, though, it has become the center of a nearly unprecedented scandal—a legal case, now known as Qatargate, that involves a sweeping police investigation and potential indictments of several members of Netanyahu’s innermost circle. The government of Qatar rejects the allegations as “journalistic propaganda.” Netanyahu, with characteristic defiance, has dismissed the claims as a “bluff.” But, of all the corruption accusations that have plagued him over the years—taking gifts from business leaders, exchanging favors for friendly news coverage—the charge that his aides doubled as influence agents for Qatar may be the most politically damaging. Naftali Bennett, a former Prime Minister who is challenging Netanyahu in the upcoming election, has called it the “most serious act of treason” in the country’s history.
Along Israeli highways, a crowdsourced campaign has erected billboards to keep the scandal in view, with messages like “Qatar Funded the Massacre and Netanyahu’s Office.” When I stopped next to one such billboard in Tel Aviv recently, a driver pulled up in a Mercedes, rolled down his window, and spat on the ground in disgust.
The billboard also displayed photographs of the alleged conspirators. Among them was Eli Feldstein, a thirtysomething with a shaved head, a close-cropped beard, and a look of searching concern. Feldstein’s name had come up when Einhorn and Footlik were looking for someone with sufficient credibility to spread their pro-Qatar messages to journalists. Einhorn had a list of candidates, which included a number of seasoned media specialists—and also Feldstein, who worked as a military-affairs spokesperson for Netanyahu.
Feldstein was relatively young, and he didn’t speak English, but he had already distinguished himself as what Einhorn called a “master communicator.” He grew up in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak and served for a decade as a media operative, working for a time in the chaotic office of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national-security minister. There, he began ingratiating himself with the Prime Minister’s aides. On October 7th, as Hamas militants ravaged communities along Israel’s southern border, he was already managing optics from afar. Feldstein recommended that Netanyahu appear with “no suit, no tie, combat mode,” and demanded that the military spokesman’s office release photos of “soldiers on the ground, with helicopters.” When the photos failed to materialize quickly enough, he griped that members of the unit were “scumbags.”
Feldstein started work in Netanyahu’s office just four days after the attacks. The surroundings weren’t glamorous. In an atmosphere of national panic, the Prime Minister was running most of his operations out of a squat nineteen-fifties building near “the Pit”—the I.D.F.’s underground command center. But, Feldstein said when I met him recently near Tel Aviv, “I was thrilled to work there. I really wanted to prove myself.”
From his first day on the job, he was called on to defend the Prime Minister, Feldstein told me. As he was getting settled, Netanyahu walked by, pointed at a television mounted on his office wall, and asked if reporters were “still talking about responsibility”—his refusal to apologize for the military and intelligence failures that led to the attacks. Feldstein replied that they were. Netanyahu, he says, told him to “do something about it.”
Feldstein’s immediate boss was Netanyahu’s closest strategic adviser, Jonatan Urich. For years, Urich had been a constant presence at the Prime Minister’s side: a bearish man with black-rimmed glasses and an inscrutable smile. Feldstein described him as “Netanyahu’s first phone call in the morning and last phone call before bed.”
Urich had started off in the military press office, where he built a reputation as a social-media whiz. In 2015, he joined Netanyahu’s election campaign and helped secure an unlikely victory. “Jonatan turned negative campaigning into art,” a former senior adviser to Netanyahu told me. “He enjoys watching the other side suffer—really enjoys it.” He was fiercely loyal to the Prime Minister. When Urich was young, his father suffered a disabling stroke; Netanyahu became a father figure to him. “I would let him perform open-heart surgery on me,” Urich once said.
During his years working for Netanyahu, Urich also had what amounted to a side hustle, working for Perception. He was able to discreetly hold both jobs because he was paid for his government work as a consultant for Likud. At the same time, he received forty per cent of Perception’s payments from Qatar, through a third-party company founded by former Israeli security officials. (Urich denies any wrongdoing, saying, “I am being targeted because I advise the Prime Minister.” He has claimed that he “never received money on behalf of Qatar in Israel.” Although he doesn’t deny that Qatar paid him eighteen thousand dollars a month through most of 2024, he argues that he was being compensated for the World Cup campaign.)
After a few months in Netanyahu’s office, Feldstein, too, effectively went on Perception’s payroll. In his telling, it was almost accidental. He was hoping for a promotion and a higher salary, but he failed a security clearance because he had previously used drugs. Urich offered him a workaround, Feldstein said: he could receive an increased salary through an intermediary. That intermediary worked with Footlik. (Footlik says he has never sought to hire anyone who worked for the Israeli government, and that the funds he provided were for an effort to secure the release of the hostages. Feldstein argues that he never knew he was working for Qatar—though he and Einhorn referred in text exchanges to the “patients” and the “friends,” with the context clearly indicating Qatar.)
Footlik allegedly oversaw the Qatar influence campaign from outside, providing funds and giving strategic advice. Einhorn and Urich orchestrated the operation. Feldstein was their foot soldier, working to get news stories written and noticed. The campaign began in late April, 2024, and soon afterward Feldstein sent Einhorn two stories that he had helped place. In one, “senior Israeli officials” were quoted as saying, “No other country is capable of bringing about a deal except Qatar.” In the other, an Israeli reporter described Turkey as “Hamas’s big brother” and contrasted it unfavorably with Qatar.
Footlik sent Feldstein a text describing his patrons’ reaction: “Eli you are killing it. Really good.”
Feldstein forwarded it to Urich, with a self-congratulatory note. “Bingo,” he wrote. “They’re in shock.”
“They’re flipping out,” Urich replied.
Qatar was historically a land rich in pearls and oil. Yet, for decades after it gained independence from Britain, in 1971, it was regarded in the West as little more than an extension of Saudi Arabia, its vastly larger neighbor. Then, in 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani took control of the country, deposing his father while he was away in Switzerland. Sheikh Hamad had lofty ambitions, and his wife Sheikha Moza bint Nasser had even loftier ones: they wanted their country to be not just independent but eminent. With only three hundred and fifty thousand citizens, Qatar lacked the manpower to establish physical dominance in the region. It barely had an army. Instead, the Sheikh and Sheikha pursued a strategy of self-defense through economic influence and self-promotion.
In 1996, Hamad founded Al Jazeera, a news network that gave the emirate enormous cultural influence throughout the region. Unlike other Arab media, the network aired interviews with Israelis and Iranians, and gave voice to dissidents across the Middle East. Before long, its broadcasts had “entered every household in Arab society,” Shaul Yanai, an Israeli historian of the Persian Gulf states, said. Ten years after its founding, three out of four Arabs identified Al Jazeera as a primary news source. Tamir Pardo, a former director of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, told me that Qatar became “not a state with Al Jazeera, but Al Jazeera with a state.”
The network also provided a vehicle for Qatar to project an ideological vision that was deeply at odds with Israel. Al Jazeera gave a prime-time slot to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who was widely regarded as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, an influential Islamist group with offshoots around the world—including Hamas. Qaradawi defended Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli civilians as a legitimate form of resistance.
The emirate’s stance toward Israel is bound up with a broader strategic concern: restraining Saudi Arabia’s power. For years, the Saudis have backed rival members of Hamad’s family, hoping to replace the ruling Emir and bring Qatar back under Saudi influence. At times, they also discussed a deal with the U.S., in which they would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for arms and the ability to develop nuclear energy—an arrangement that would have made it the dominant power in the region. For the Qataris, Yanai said, insuring that Saudi Arabia and Israel do not normalize ties “is existential.”
In 2013, Hamad ceded the throne to his son, Tamim. According to Dennis Ross, a former U.S. envoy to the region, Tamim views the Muslim Brotherhood more instrumentally and less ideologically than his father. But he has opposed normalization with Israel. “Are things normal in Israel? No!” he said in 2022. Between the Emir’s resistance, Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians, and the influence of figures like Qaradawi, “this has led to a generation for whom Israel is the greatest demon that exists,” Yanai said.
Nevertheless, Qatar treated Israel with what Yanai called “the famous Qatari duality.” In public, it called Israel the “occupation government” and provided aid to Hamas; in private, it maintained business ties and unofficial diplomatic contacts with high-ranking Israeli officials.
Ronit Marzan, a political scientist at the University of Haifa, describes Qatar’s approach to international diplomacy as “lulling empowerment.” In the U.S., for instance, it “buys weapons, invests in companies and in educational institutions. Then, slowly, the other state actor becomes addicted to the money.” Qatar shares the world’s largest natural-gas field with Iran, but has also backed the opposition to Iran’s allies in the Syrian government. It funds the Lebanese Army, but has also allegedly propped up Hezbollah. It hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, but also backed Islamist factions in Egypt and Libya. It gave a Boeing 747 to Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and another to President Donald Trump. Ross told me, “The Qatari approach to the outside is to say, ‘The way we punch above our weight is by being uniquely situated to talk to everyone.’ ”
Perception held a similarly transactional view of power. By 2024, the firm was so entrenched in Netanyahu’s office that it was able to quietly dispatch the Prime Minister’s closest advisers to assist right-wing political candidates in Eastern Europe. Feldstein spent ten days on a campaign for a Perception client in Georgia. Netanyahu’s family spokesperson led one in Romania. Einhorn connected another senior adviser to a campaign that an acquaintance was running in Kosovo.
Einhorn himself worked on a campaign for Aleksandar Vučić, the President of Serbia. He told officials there that he had assisted the Israeli government with sensitive security matters. During the war in Gaza, he said, a shipment of arms to Israel had been held up in Eastern Europe, and he helped secure its release by arranging a phone call between Netanyahu and the Prime Minister of Montenegro. “I put myself on mute, and the two of them talked,” he said.
Feldstein never heard Netanyahu ask why his advisers were absent or where they were. (When the Qatargate story emerged later, this laissez-faire attitude outraged security veterans. “How can it be that the Prime Minister doesn’t know that his people are working for another government?” Pardo, the former head of Mossad, said. “And how come, once he learns it, he doesn’t tell them, ‘Guys, look me in the eye—you’re not coming anywhere near Jerusalem. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve betrayed me.’ ”)
In Einhorn’s view, it was natural that Netanyahu’s consultants were in demand around the world: they were shrewd campaign strategists and proven winners. Others concluded that the advisers were useful mostly for their proximity to Netanyahu. “These guys don’t know how to run a campaign for the State of Israel,” the former senior adviser to Netanyahu said. “They know how to be Bibi’s right hand.” In the lead-up to the World Cup, Qatar retained at least four of the world’s top public-relations firms. It didn’t need Perception—a company so small that it had no salaried employees. “It’s clear as day that they were approached because of their access to Netanyahu,” Aron Shaviv, a political strategist who oversaw Likud’s 2015 campaign, said. “And Qatar continued to keep them on retainer because now it had an asset.”
In May, 2024, I.D.F. troops pushed into the town of Rafah, on the Egyptian border, where more than a million displaced Gazans had evacuated on Israel’s orders and were now sheltering in makeshift tents. In the course of three weeks, Israeli soldiers destroyed much of the area, razing schools and mosques and commandeering buildings for use as military posts. The assault inspired worldwide outrage; the International Court of Justice demanded an immediate halt.
As the Israeli media focussed intently on the incursion, Einhorn grew restless about the progress of the pro-Qatar campaign. On May 24th, he asked Feldstein, “Anything for today?” There wasn’t. The previous night, the I.D.F. had retrieved the remains of three hostages from the sprawling Jabalia refugee camp. “Everyone is busy with recovering the bodies,” Feldstein replied, in messages published by Israel’s i24 News. But he said that he was happy to talk if Einhorn had “any ideas.”
Two minutes later, Einhorn wrote back to suggest that Feldstein give a briefing to journalists. Egypt had been deeply involved in talks over a ceasefire and a hostage-release deal. But Einhorn wanted to spread the message that “Egypt can no longer be trusted. From now on, only Qatar will lead the negotiations.” The quote should be attributed to “senior U.S. officials” in talks “behind closed doors,” he wrote.
That evening, during the prime-time news on Channel 12, a military reporter named Nir Dvori relayed the story nearly word for word. The network’s news anchor was astonished. “The Americans are saying this?” he asked.
“The Americans!” Dvori repeated.
This wasn’t the only time that the men apparently attributed made-up briefings to U.S. officials. The Biden Administration wasn’t surprised. “The assumption was that everyone was spinning everyone,” a former senior U.S. official in the region told me. But the Egyptians were furious. Mohamed Abu Hamed, an influential former lawmaker, wrote online later, “I haven’t seen anything dirtier than an Arab country paying money to cast doubt on the role played by another Arab country and create a fake role for itself.” (Qatar denied any effort to improperly influence Israeli officials. A Qatari spokesman said, “Put simply, if Qatar had somehow ‘infiltrated’ the Israeli government, it would have been a very bad investment.”)
After a blitz of pro-Qatar messaging, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. told Jewish groups, with no apparent evidence, that Egypt was violating its peace agreement with Israel. Feldstein and Einhorn seemed unconcerned about disrupting relations with Egypt, Israel’s most important peace partner in the region. “We’ve managed to really piss them off,” Feldstein texted at one point.
Days after planting the story on Channel 12, Einhorn prodded Feldstein again. “We’ve been too quiet,” he wrote. “Tomorrow we have to fire.” They came up with another story, saying that Qatar was growing disillusioned with Hamas. This wasn’t true—in fact, Qatar had declined to formally expel Hamas leaders from Doha, despite requests from American officials. But Feldstein devised an imaginary context: “a meeting held yesterday in Doha between the Qatari prime minister, the Egyptian intelligence chief, and senior Hamas officials.” That story, too, was picked up by Channel 12. “It’s a bombshell,” Feldstein wrote afterward. “Ballistic,” Einhorn replied.
The campaign seemed fuelled by such cheerful cynicism. In messages, Urich hailed Feldstein as the “No. 1 spinner.” In the course of several months, Feldstein told me, “there were dozens of reports in Qatar’s favor.” Einhorn flew the editor of the Jerusalem Post to Doha; he later produced two reports that seemed lifted straight from Qatari talking points. Footlik also paid tens of thousands of dollars to a columnist for Haaretz. (The columnist subsequently resigned but denies wrongdoing.)
Not every journalist was duped. One responded to a pitch from Feldstein, “Do you work for the Qataris?!” (Feldstein: “Hahaha.”) Yet many appeared eager to take Feldstein’s shifting attributions at face value. Dvori, the Channel 12 reporter, later wrote online that he had no reason to doubt that Feldstein’s briefings were given “on behalf of the Prime Minister.” At times, he said, Feldstein even put Netanyahu on the phone. “It never occurred to me that Netanyahu’s people were serving Qatar for a fee,” he wrote.
If Netanyahu wondered why pro- Qatar narratives kept surfacing in stories that originated from his office, he gave no sign of it. In Feldstein’s view, “that is proof that the messages were the Prime Minister’s messages. No one was rebelling in real time.”
Netanyahu’s position on Qatar had long confounded those who worked with him, according to a former senior Israeli defense official. Many of his decisions orbited around Gaza. In 2007, Hamas seized control of the Strip, and Israel imposed a punishing blockade. Five years later, Sheikh Hamad effectively broke the siege by visiting Gaza and pledging more than four hundred million dollars to reconstruction efforts there. Israel condemned the visit, but Netanyahu didn’t intervene.
Although Netanyahu publicly described Hamas as an enemy, he was privately intent on keeping it strong. Hamas competed for influence with the Palestinian Authority—the civil government that runs parts of the West Bank—which Netanyahu did not want to take control of Gaza. He reasoned that, as long as Hamas was in power, Palestinians would remain divided, and Israel would face less pressure to negotiate a land-for-peace deal. As Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli Prime Minister, put it, Netanyahu’s policy was “very clearly that Hamas was an asset and the P.A. was a liability.”
His instrumental approach to Hamas extended to Qatar, too. In 2017, a dozen Muslim-majority countries severed ties with the emirate, accusing it of sponsoring terror and fomenting chaos around the world. In the U.S., the House took up a bill to impose sanctions on Qatar. “For us, this was a golden opportunity” to cut off Qatar’s influence in Gaza, Roni Alsheikh, who served as deputy director of the Shin Bet security agency and as head of the Israeli police, said. Instead, a Netanyahu military adviser wrote a letter stating that “Qatar has not delivered weapons to Hamas” and was engaging solely in humanitarian work in Gaza. A pro-Qatar lobbying group sent the letter to members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Soon afterward, the bill was abandoned.
The following year, a roadside bomb targeted the Palestinian Authority’s Prime Minister as his convoy was driving in Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the P.A., was enraged. He accused Hamas of an assassination attempt and slashed economic lifelines to Gaza. The result was surging unemployment, civil unrest, and mayhem on the border.
With Hamas squeezed, Netanyahu asked the Qataris to commit to official monthly payments to Gaza. He explained it as a strategy of buying stability: “I do what I can to restore peace to the southern communities.” But many defense officials considered it unconscionable to provide funds that Hamas could siphon off. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman resigned in protest over the handling of Hamas. Even Netanyahu eventually acknowledged that Hamas leaders “take all the money that comes in from international support—and there’s quite a bit of it—and they put it into turning tunnels into a terror machine.” Yet he did not halt the transfers. Pardo, the former director of Mossad, described it to me as “a knife stab in Israel’s national security.”
Rumors began to spread that Netanyahu had covert links with Qatar. “There were definitely indications that there was a complex relationship there, including the idea that part of how Hamas was surviving was these understandings between Netanyahu and Qatar,” Ben Rhodes, a foreign-policy adviser under Barack Obama, told me.
On October 7th, the strategy of quietly propping up Hamas collapsed. In Israel, Netanyahu seemed finished politically; surely he couldn’t survive the biggest security failure in the country’s history. Yet, that morning, the first foreign leader he called, before he even gave a statement to the public, was the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who has close ties to Qatar.
He also relied on his confidant Yossi Cohen, a former Mossad director with his own links to Qatar. Soon after the attacks, Cohen flew to Doha on a private plane, bypassing official Mossad channels. The agency’s new director issued an unusually harsh public rebuke. But Netanyahu defended his adviser, saying in a statement, “Cohen had initiated a meeting with an Arab leader with the approval of the prime minister.”
The following August, six Israeli hostages were executed by Hamas in a tunnel in Rafah, after more than three hundred days in captivity. Israelis poured into the streets, outraged that Netanyahu had squandered opportunities to reach a deal that might have saved them. Protests spilled onto the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway and lasted for days, representing a profound threat to the Israeli government.
Netanyahu grew nervous. Feldstein told me that he thought the Prime Minister should address the public immediately, but he was rebuffed. Then he had another idea to undercut the protests. An acquaintance from his father’s synagogue had told him about a Hamas document that he’d seen during his reserve service in military intelligence. The document, which was highly classified and written in Arabic, suggested that Hamas was planning to exploit the hostage families’ protests to fracture Israeli society. Feldstein says that he approached Netanyahu after a press conference and whispered to him about the document, saying that he and Urich were working on getting it out. The Prime Minister nodded in approval. (Netanyahu has denied having any knowledge of the document.)
There was an obstacle: the military censor barred publishing the memo, because it compromised Israeli intelligence. But Urich had a solution, Feldstein said. He told Feldstein to ask Einhorn to leak it to a foreign outlet, so that the Israeli media could legally report on the stories published abroad.
On September 6, 2024, the German tabloid Bild published a story on the Hamas document. The article’s description of the memo was misleading: Though the headline suggested that it was linked to the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, it was apparently written by mid-level officials. And though Bild presented the document as evidence of Hamas’s intransigence, it skipped over language showing that its leaders were willing to compromise. Still, in a Cabinet meeting two days later, Netanyahu referred to the story as proof that the protests were playing into Hamas’s hands. Urich texted Feldstein, “The boss is happy.”
The Qataris had reasons to be happy, too. Trump had placed Qatar at the center of a temporary ceasefire and hostage-release deal that went into effect in January, 2025. Netanyahu pulled out of the agreement that March, but Qatar remained the principal venue for indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas. In October, a road-map peace deal was signed, and Trump thanked the Qataris, saying that they had been a “very big factor.”
Other negotiators were frustrated. Yair Barak, an Israeli official who served on the negotiating team, told Israel’s public broadcaster that Qatar was so biased in the talks that his peers referred to it as “Hamas’s representative.” Jonathan Schanzer, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described the Qataris as both “the arsonists and the firefighters.” But Doha had succeeded in establishing itself as an indispensable player in the region’s politics. After October 7th, Qatar was vilified in Israel, but, as Uri Tuval, who has covered Qatargate extensively for the liberal magazine Telem, said, “Fast-forward three years—Qatar now has a foothold in the Mediterranean.”
Two months after Bild published the secret document, Feldstein was jolted awake at four-forty-five in the morning by pounding on his door. “Police!” voices shouted. Feldstein told me that he opened the door in his boxers, shaking so violently that he barely managed to turn the lock. Masked men carrying M16s barged in, handcuffed him, and pinned him to the floor. They seized his phone and laptop, and warned his roommate not to utter a word to anyone. “You’re suspected of harming national security,” they told him.
“I said, ‘I want an attorney,’ ” he recalled. “They said, ‘There is no attorney.’ ” He ultimately spent almost six weeks in detention and seven months under house arrest.
Feldstein’s arrest was kept under a sweeping gag order, for fear that disclosing it would compromise Israeli intelligence, but the Haaretz reporter Bar Peleg soon learned of it. Peleg had never before written about the Prime Minister’s inner circle; he spent the early days of the war mostly covering the hostage families. But, as he looked into Feldstein, a tip led him to a Google Doc that had two listed authors: Jonatan Urich and Yisrael Einhorn. Written in 2022, it described Perception’s pitch for Qatar’s World Cup campaign. “There was even a suggestion that Qatar host a soccer friendly between Israeli and Palestinian youths,” Peleg told me, with a laugh.
In November, 2024, Peleg exposed the connection between Netanyahu’s advisers and the Qataris. The police were reluctant to investigate, he says; a law- enforcement source had told him that they were “afraid of touching the Prime Minister’s office.” But the Shin Bet began gathering evidence, and, in February, 2025, a criminal investigation was launched. The next month, Feldstein, still on house arrest, was arrested again, as was Urich, on suspicion of contact with a foreign agent, bribery, fraud, breach of trust, and money laundering.
The revelations prompted renewed scrutiny of Israel’s relationship with Doha. Some observers speculated that, if Netanyahu’s closest aides were benefitting from Qatar, maybe he was, too. Among those who made accusations were several officials who had served at the highest levels of Israel’s security establishment. One of them, Udi Levi, told me recently, “I will say it plainly: I claim that the Prime Minister received money from Qatar.”
Between 2001 and 2016, Levi headed a division of Mossad that tracked terror-financing networks around the world. He worked closely with Netanyahu, and also voted for him, but has since become an impassioned, nearly obsessive critic. He is sixty-three, with the burly build of a former wrestler and the injuries to match. When I saw him, a bad back made him wince every few steps.
Levi’s suspicions began in April, 2021, when an unusual news alert appeared on his phone. The article was titled “Qatar Connection,” and Levi, a self-described “addict” of news about Qatari intrigue, clicked on it instantly. The report was from a French outlet called Blast, which publishes ambitious investigations in overheated prose. It included images of four documents from a decade earlier; three were on the letterhead of the Qatari finance ministry. They said, in Arabic, that millions of euros had been sent to prominent figures in France, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, a public intellectual who often commented on Middle Eastern politics, and Carla Bruni, the President’s wife. Millions more were supposedly earmarked for Laurent Platini, the son of the president of the European Football Association—and were to be paid around the time that FIFA announced that Qatar had been chosen to host the World Cup. (Both Bruni and Platini deny receiving any payments. Lévy sued for defamation, calling the documents fake, but lost his case and a subsequent appeal; a French court noted, “The journalists acted with sufficient caution and factual basis.”)
The reporters, Bernard Nicolas and Thierry Gadault, believed that the files had been hacked by Project Raven, a long-running surveillance operation conducted by Emirati intelligence. Their report was the first in a series of articles that accused Qatar of making payoffs to more than a dozen figures. Udi Levi followed the installments with growing interest. He had recently been hired as a consultant for families of Syrian victims of terrorism, who were suing a Qatari bank in the U.K. for sponsoring the terror group Jabhat al-Nusra. But half of the claimants dropped their suit, and Levi maintained that they were being threatened or paid off. (The defendants denied any interference.) “I was caught up in a crazy cycle of Qatari bribery neutralizing the prosecution,” Levi told me. The alleged payoffs he was reading about in Blast “fit like a glove.”
That October, Blast published a piece suggesting that, in 2012, Qatar’s Prime Minister had ordered his finance minister to provide “financial-aid packages” to two Israeli politicians. Fifteen million dollars were to be paid to “Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, Chairman of Likud.” Five million dollars were to go to Avigdor Lieberman, who headed the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu Party. The two men ran on a joint ticket that year. The money, the order said, was for the “upcoming election campaign.” A subsequent letter, bearing the signature of the head of the Qatar Central Bank, seemed to confirm the transfer. (Both men have denied receiving funds from Qatar.)
As Levi examined the documents, he says, “a red light went on in my head.” The timing of the payments corresponded with unusual shifts in Netanyahu’s policies. The transfer from 2012 came a few days before Israel announced the end of a military operation in Gaza; not long after, Netanyahu effectively acquiesced to Sheikh Hamad’s visit. Blast also published documents detailing the alleged transfer of an additional fifty million dollars to Netanyahu in 2018. A letter from Qatar’s finance minister to the Emir’s office noted that the money “will be delivered in cash to the State Security Service.” This order came ten days before Qatar’s first cash transfer to Gaza.
Levi wondered whether the alleged payments had been reported elsewhere. He discovered that, two years earlier, the popular Egyptian newspaper Youm7 had run a brief article. Citing “knowledgeable Arab sources,” it described a twenty- million-dollar transfer from Qatar to Likud for a campaign in 2012 and another fifty million dollars six years later—the same amounts in the Blast files.
Levi knew that the reports could easily have been based on forged documents. There was no shortage of state actors with an interest in discrediting Qatar and Netanyahu; it could have been the Egyptians, or the Emiratis, or Iran. Still skeptical, he conducted a forensic examination of the files. The Qatari names had the correct honorifics and salutations, he told me; the signatures matched the originals, though some looked digital. Perhaps most interestingly, the documents bore serial numbers. Levi later gained access to a cache of Qatari documents from roughly the same period, which Syrian hackers had taken from the offices of the Sheikh, among others. The serial numbers on those documents appeared to align with the sequence of the Blast files, forming a consistent chronological progression. “Everything seemed to match,” Levi recalls thinking.
The Qatari government adamantly denies making any payments. “The pattern is familiar: fake official documents are circulated to the media to support sensational claims about Qatar, only to fall apart when subjected to meaningful scrutiny,” the spokesman said. “We have strong evidence that, for several years, various parties, including elements of Israel’s far right, have been involved in circulating fabricated documents through the media in an effort to incriminate Qatar.”
A week after the first Blast piece ran, Qatar announced that its former minister of finance, Ali Sherif al-Emadi, had been arrested; he was subsequently sentenced to twenty years in prison for bribery and abuse of power. As news of the Blast allegations spread, Levi says, “I expected an earthquake.” For a time, Israeli journalists tried to follow up, but it soon became clear that there would be no conclusive proof of the documents’ authenticity. The files didn’t contain bank-account details, and, even if Qatar had ordered the transfers, there was no evidence that Netanyahu had actually received the money.
Still, some former security officials thought that the claims warranted a serious investigation. “You can’t not investigate it,” Roni Alsheikh, the former deputy director of the Shin Bet, told Telem. “These are suspicions of the highest level.” Yet there has been no official investigation related to the Blast files. Netanyahu dismissed the allegations, and is suing Levi and several other Israelis who have made similar charges. (His attorney has postponed hearings in one case so frequently that a judge finally fined Netanyahu and forced him to settle on a date this December.)
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attacks, Levi urged the hostage families to pressure the Israeli government to threaten Qatar with war if their loved ones “were not returned within forty-eight hours.” Instead, he watched with outrage as the Qataris took the lead on negotiations. He was not alone in his alarm. Yigal Carmon, a conservative retired colonel in Israeli military intelligence and the founder of MEMRI, a research center that monitors media across the Muslim world, had spent years insisting that Qatar was a sponsor of terrorism. In December, two months after the attacks, he republished the Blast files as part of a report warning about Qatar’s expanding influence. (Netanyahu is suing him, too.) When I met Carmon at MEMRI’s office in Jerusalem, he gestured at a framed photograph showing a Hamas chief shaking hands with a Qatari Emir. “Hamas is Qatar, Qatar is Hamas,” he said.
Soon after Carmon published the report, he became embroiled in a peculiar fraud. He was introduced to a man named Matthew Cohen, who he was led to believe had C.I.A. connections. In the following months, Cohen arranged for a source to sell Carmon two batches of documents, from Qatar’s finance ministry and Jordan’s anti-fraud authority, that he claimed corroborated the Blast files. Carmon raised a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to purchase the documents, then published them online.
Levi, who has known Carmon for years, says that he called him as soon as he saw the files. “Yigal, are you crazy?” he asked. The documents should have raised immediate suspicion: they lacked the appropriate letterheads and serial numbers associated with those offices. The cache also included a copy of a ten-million-dollar check purportedly written by a company with ties to Netanyahu to a company associated with Hamas—yet a simple Google search showed that the check had the same number as one on an online template.
Levi urged Carmon to take the post down, but the damage had already been done. In July, 2024, the financial newspaper TheMarker reported that there was a booming trade in forged documents in Israel. The article mentioned the Blast files alongside the Cohen trove, suggesting that all the documents were fake. Matthew Cohen—who has also gone by Jason Goose—played his own part in discrediting the files. He bragged to the press that the documents were forged and that Carmon didn’t care. When I spoke with Cohen recently, he didn’t seem to regret the scam. “The whole concept of espionage is deception,” he told me.
Last April, a similar operation targeted Eliad Shraga, a prominent lawyer associated with Israel’s anti-government protest movement. An ultra-Orthodox private investigator named Avi Lehrer called Shraga and claimed to have bank records showing that Netanyahu and his family held millions of dollars in offshore accounts. Lehrer arranged a meeting to sell him the files—then never showed up. Instead, a recording of their conversation surfaced on Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu television network. Lehrer later posted the segment on social media, tagging Yair Netanyahu, the Prime Minister’s son.
Lehrer has boasted in private about his connections with the Netanyahu family. Last year, he and Cohen met in Miami. During the meeting, which was first reported by TheMarker, Lehrer said that he had done “favors” for both Yair and his father, and had got work in return. (Yair has disputed this.)
Levi argues that the Blast files were deliberately compromised to distract from their contents. “It’s a well-known method—flood the scene with a lot of fake evidence until the entire investigation is contaminated,” he said. Alsheikh, the former Shin Bet deputy director, agreed: “Someone was interested not in strengthening the message but in shutting it down.”
A month after the Bild publication, Feldstein had a remarkable encounter with his employers. One night, Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, summoned him to a parking lot underneath the I.D.F. headquarters, in Tel Aviv. When Feldstein arrived, around midnight, Braverman got into his car and asked him to surrender his phone to an aide standing outside. With the car secured, Braverman said he’d heard rumors that the I.D.F. had opened an investigation into a document leak. Braverman told Feldstein that he could “shut it down.” (Braverman denies this, and says that he can’t recall whether he met with Feldstein that night.)
It didn’t work. Feldstein was arrested three weeks later, and, in November, 2024, he was indicted for leaking the top- secret document to Bild, an offense that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Yet investigators have struggled to connect Einhorn and Urich with either the Bild case or Qatargate. A day after Feldstein’s arrest, Urich deleted his phone’s text history. (He said that he had bought a new phone.) Einhorn had relocated with his family to Serbia, and refused to return for questioning.
By this summer, prosecutors had finally added Urich to the Bild indictment and named Einhorn as a suspect in the case. But the progress of the Qatargate investigation remained uncertain. When Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, sought to expand the probe, Netanyahu moved to fire him. Bar resigned soon afterward, saying that he was being pushed out because of the investigation. (Netanyahu denies this.) The move was “particularly troubling,” Bar wrote in an affidavit, “given the extremely serious suspicions of harm to national security.” To replace Bar, Netanyahu selected a retired major general named David Zini—despite opposition from four former Shin Bet directors and hundreds of employees, who warned that Zini was a Netanyahu ally who would prioritize loyalty over the rule of law.
Israel’s attorney general cautioned that the appointment was mired in conflicts of interest, and insured that the Qatargate investigation would continue. But the investigation was completed months ago, and no indictments have yet been made. The Shin Bet has since circulated an opinion among security officials, suggesting that the conduct of Netanyahu’s aides did not amount to a national-security threat. A law-enforcement source told Haaretz that the serious allegations remain unchanged: “The only thing that changed was the person at the top of the Shin Bet.”
In March, Netanyahu cleared his schedule to give public testimony about Qatargate. By all accounts, the aide he was most intent on protecting was Urich. He testified that he didn’t know Urich had been working for Qatar. Even if he had known, he added, “There is nothing wrong with that. Qatar is not an enemy state.” (Six months later, Netanyahu ordered a strike on Doha during a meeting of Hamas leaders, after which Trump forced him to make a public apology to the Qatari Emir.)
Urich is being represented by Netanyahu’s personal attorney, and Likud is reportedly financing his defense. Netanyahu also staged a supportive photo opportunity: on a blustery evening, he embraced Urich outside his office in Jerusalem, and the two men walked away hand in hand, while cameras flashed. By then, Urich had gone back to work for the Prime Minister. He had also signalled a redemptive spiritual conversion. After his arrest, he began sporting a thick beard and a large black kippah associated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. He recently wrote on a Chabad site that the late Lubavitcher Rebbe had “delivered a message to me in prison.”
But every day in Israel, it seems, brings fresh accusations against the Prime Minister’s office. Even the right-wing daily Israel Hayom recently ran a front-page story alleging that Urich and the other advisers had passed classified information to Qatar (something they denied). The election, scheduled for October 27th, will be the first one since the Hamas attack and the war that has shattered Israel’s standing in the world. Earlier this year, sixty-one per cent of Israelis described the Qatargate affair as “serious.” Among voters of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, less than a third viewed it that way.
Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief who is Netanyahu’s most serious competitor in the coming election, said he believes that the Prime Minister was aware of his advisers’ connections to Qatar. When a voter asked about Qatargate during a campaign stop in August, he answered, “Netanyahu knows what [Urich] did. Anyone who engaged in criminal activity will pay a very heavy price and, as far as I’m concerned, will sit in prison until their last day.”
Feldstein told me that his time in prison was disillusioning. For the first nine days, he was barred from meeting with an attorney. At one point, guards brought a television into his cell, and Feldstein tuned in to “The Patriots,” a talk show on Channel 14. He watched as the host displayed family photos of the Feldsteins and played a Hebrew song that he loved, one that his parents had requested. “It gave me a lot of spirit,” Feldstein recalled when I met him, in July. “But then I understood that I wasn’t the story for them—Bibi was. It was meant to serve his interests, not mine, and that hurt me a little.”
We were sitting in his attorney’s office on the thirty-sixth floor of a high-rise in the city of Ramat Gan, overlooking the Tel Aviv skyline. Feldstein appeared no different from any other young resident of Tel Aviv. He has a broad, animated face, and wore a T-shirt and jeans; the distinctive black kippah I remembered from photographs was gone. He is a fast talker who stuttered as a child; occasionally, during a three-hour conversation full of recrimination and regret, the stutter returned.
On the fifth day of Feldstein’s detention, Netanyahu’s office issued a terse statement: “No one from the Prime Minister’s office has been arrested or questioned.” In the days that followed, Netanyahu suggested that he barely knew who Feldstein was, and that he’d never worked for the Prime Minister. A few weeks later, as Feldstein’s attorney was going on Israeli television to publicize the case, Netanyahu defended his former aide as an “Israeli patriot, an ardent Zionist.” He later changed course again and described Feldstein as “a nothing.”
Feldstein told me that his parents were offered the services of an attorney close to Netanyahu, free of charge, but they refused. Feldstein said that his father argued, “I need a lawyer who will defend my son, not the Prime Minister.” The family instead hired Oded Savoray, a prominent litigator who has been outspoken in his opposition to the government. During their first meeting in prison, Savoray told Feldstein that Netanyahu and his advisers were not standing behind him, but Feldstein refused to accept it. Savoray returned the next morning with printouts of news articles showing that Netanyahu was disavowing him. That day, Savoray recalled, “I saw a broken man.”
Feldstein still awaits trial in the leak case and may be indicted for his part in Qatargate. When I met him, however, he did his best to project confidence. Since his house arrest ended, he has started a strategic-consulting business. Though his notoriety had driven away some prospective clients, he said that his “experience in crisis management” had attracted others. Recently, he ran into a Channel 14 host, who yelled at him for breaking ranks with Netanyahu. “It’s been difficult for my family and also for me personally, because it’s not like I’m here for revenge,” Feldstein said. I asked whether he felt disappointed with Netanyahu. He rose from his chair and began to pace the room. “In some respects yes, and in some respects no,” he said eventually. “At the end of the day, Netanyahu cares about Netanyahu.” ♦