A source from the Israeli security services claims that advisors to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Yisrael Einhorn, alias Srulik, Yonatan Urich and Eli Feldstein, passed confidential information from security talks concerning Egypt to Qatar, the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reports.
As the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network of Serbia (BIRN) previously reported, last July Einhorn, known to the Serbian public as a former advisor to President Aleksandar Vučić, was questioned by two Israeli investigators at the Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade in connection with Cathargate.
According to BIRN, secrecy regarding the details of his interrogation in Belgrade was requested by Serbia.
An unnamed source from high-ranking security circles told Israel Hayom that the classified information did not go from Qatar to Netanyahu's advisers, which is a basic assumption in the investigation into the affair, but that it flowed in the opposite direction - from Netanyahu's advisers to Qatar.
Qatar then tried to use information from the confidential conversations to incriminate Egypt in the Israeli media.
At the time, Qatar and Egypt were jointly participating as mediators in negotiations for the release of Israeli hostages, who were being held in Gaza by the pro-Iranian militant movement Hamas.
The aim of the operation, the source said, was to enable Qatar to spread damaging allegations about Egypt through Netanyahu's advisors to the Israeli media.
This would allow Doha to have greater influence in the negotiations.
Israeli military officials were concerned about the allegations against Egypt, arguing that they could jeopardize the peace agreement between official Jerusalem and Cairo, and make Egypt less willing to assist in the hostage-free effort.
Only later, according to the source, did military officials realize that the campaign was actually part of a Qatari operation to exert influence.
At the height of the affair, even the Israeli ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, said that Egypt was violating the peace agreement.
The claims turned out to be false, raising the question of whether someone had intentionally provided the ambassador with false information.
Until now, investigators of the Qatargate affair have worked on the assumption that the flow of information went in one direction: Qatar hired Netanyahu's advisors Einhorn, Urich, and Feldstein, supplied them with claims that portrayed Egypt in a bad light, and they in turn passed them on to Israeli journalists.
A source for Israel Hayom says that the material used by Qatar to smear Egypt did not come from a publicly available source of information, nor from information Netanyahu had already received, as testified by a suspect in the case.
Instead, the material was taken directly from top-secret discussions at the heart of Israel's national security establishment.
The Israeli newspaper's source claims that the direction of the information flow was completely reversed: the allegedly incriminating information about Egypt did not come from Qatar to Netanyahu's advisors and then to journalists, but rather emerged from the Israeli security system, reached Qatar, and ultimately passed on to Israeli journalists.
The Israel Hayom newspaper emphasizes that it is claimed that all three advisors merely passed on information from confidential conversations to journalists, and not necessarily that they personally participated in security meetings.
According to the source, during the spring of 2024 and thereafter, several security discussions were held, attended by representatives of the Shin Bet security agency, the Israeli army, the National Security Council, and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
At the heart of the conversation was the question of whether Egypt was violating the peace agreement with Israel, particularly regarding the deployment of forces in Sinai, which requires the approval of the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, and the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army.
The meetings were part of an effort to assess Israeli-Egyptian relations and assess the situation amid concerns that the escalation could spread to the Egyptian side of the border and affect Israel.
Questions about Egypt's commitment to Israel were raised again at another meeting during the same period.
Israel Hayom contacted a second security source who participated in the talks, and he confirmed that the meetings regarding Egypt did indeed take place at the time stated by the first source.
Another source said that the issue of Egypt's alleged violation of the agreement was raised during the talks, and that Qatar tried to exploit the topic and put it at the center of Israeli media coverage.
He stated that, even at that time, he believed that the Egypt issue was being artificially inflated beyond the bounds of professional security discussion.
He added that he saw in real time that the allegations against Egypt and in favor of Qatar coincided with the period in which the confidential talks were taking place.
The central suspicion in the Qatargate affair is that Netanyahu's advisers Einhorn, Urich, and Feldstein worked to pass messages to journalists on behalf of a "diplomatic source," when in fact they originated from Qatar.
Lawyers for Einhorn and Urich deny the allegations made by the Israel Hayom source. Einhorn's attorney claims that he was never an advisor to Netanyahu and did not work in his cabinet.
Israeli police declared Einhorn a fugitive criminal in mid-January and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Last July, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Einhorn's company in Serbia earned $2,3 million from "services in the foreign market" between April and December 2024, during which he "emigrated to Serbia."
At the end of last April, after researching with Haaretz, BIRN wrote that "Einhorn helped organize meetings at the highest level that were important for the start of the export of Serbian ammunition to Israel via Montenegro."
He worked for the President of Serbia as early as 2020, on a campaign to present Vučić in a positive light in the West.
The campaign plan, aimed primarily at the US and the Democratic Party, was for Vučić to "make guest appearances on popular global podcasts, as well as to be the narrator in a historical mini-series about Serbia," BIRN writes.
In addition, there are plans to put up billboards in Western capitals, on which Vučić praises Serbia's economic achievements.
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