When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu returned from his official visit to Washington DC in the first week of February 2025, he had to go directly to the court, where he has been on trial for charges of corruption and breach of trust, a process that would continue for the next couple of months. However, that is not his only legal woe.

Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister and former Chief of Israeli Defence Force (IDF), and former Mossad Chief Danny Yatom, together with a number of retired generals and security officials, published an open letter on February 12, 2025, demanding a probe into Qatar’s influence in the office of Netanyahu! It prompted Chairman of Democrats Party General (Retired) Yair Golan to call for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his staff to be investigated for treason. Golan, a former Deputy Chief of Staff of the IDF, is a strong supporter of the Two-State Solution, like other signatories of the letter. On February 15, Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet announced that it was investigating the allegation.

The case involves members of the Prime Minister’s own staff, having direct and paid relations with the Government of Qatar, a country with which Israel does not have diplomatic relations, although it is not considered an enemy state. Netanyahu, himself, has been widely accused for years of supporting the Palestinian Hamas Movement as a means of directly undermining the PLO and the Palestinian National Authority. He is known for having approved Qatar’s transfer of millions of US Dollars to Hamas in return for the Palestinian outfit refraining from attacking Israel.

The pact was broken with Hamas launching terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, for which a large section of the Israeli population holds Prime Minister Netanyahu responsible. It is also widely believed that had there been an independent investigative commission on the security failure of October 7, it would name Netanyahu as chief suspect.

According to Israeli Hebrew media, a former press spokesperson for Netanyahu, Eli Feldstein, was reportedly hired by a Doha-employed US strategist to publish articles portraying Qatar in a favourable light. This relationship continued throughout the current conflict, although Qatar was playing a key role in the hostage negotiation talks. Feldstein had already been put under house arrest last fall for passing classified documents concerning those negotiations to the media.

A second case involves two top Netanyahu aides, Jonatan Urich and Yisrael Einhorn, who did public relations works for Qatar ahead of the 2022 Football World Cup through their company, called Koios. Einhorn and another aide of the Prime Minister, Ofer Golan, were indicted on February 11, 2025 on charges of witness intimidation, in the ongoing corruption case against Netanyahu.

The Founder-Chairman of Koios, Brigadier General (Retired) Eli Ben-Meir, was the former head of research at Military Intelligence. As a reserve officer, he heads the investigation team in the IDF’s Southern Command, looking into the events of October 7, 2023. The links of his company to Qatar have raised serious concerns.

This article was first published in Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) Strategic Alert weekly newsletter (Volume 39, No. 8) on February 20, 2025.

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das