Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, was detained on Sunday morning for questioning under caution by the police’s Lahav 33 unit on suspicion of obstructing the investigation into the case of the leaked classified documents to the German Bild newspaper.

The police also conducted a search of his home.

Braverman is regarded as a key figure within the Prime Minister’s Office, overseeing sensitive matters and coordination among various agencies, and was recently appointed as Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

His summons for questioning follows claims made by former Netanyahu spokesperson, Eli Feldstein, the main suspect in the Bild case, in an interview with Kan News. Feldstein himself was also summoned for questioning, and it is possible that police will carry out a confrontation between the two.

The move follows reports that police have found corroboration for Feldstein’s account of an unusual meeting he described during the interview. He claimed he and Braverman met late at night during the war in a parking garage at the Kirya in Tel Aviv in a meeting conducted with precautionary measures, including leaving their phones behind and choosing an area without security cameras. He claimed that during the meeting, which he described as “extremely pressured,” Braverman allegedly proposed thwarting a security investigation—the case that would later become known as the “classified documents case.”

According to Feldstein, Braverman told him about an investigation being carried out by the Defense Ministry’s information security department, adding that he can “shut down” the investigation.

Feldstein said that he described this meeting during his Shin Bet interrogation but at the time did not mention Braverman by name, saying only that it involved “a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office.”

This investigation is the latest in a series of probes in recent years involving members of the Prime Minister’s Office. Right-wing politicians say that the recurring focus on Netanyahu’s inner circle amounts to a campaign of ongoing pressure on his office, even when the suspicions do not directly involve the prime minister.

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)