The prosecution has until October 26 to submit a response to the appeal by the prime minister's aide and chief “Qatargate” suspect Yonatan Urich to the Supreme Court, it announced.
On Sunday, Urich, through his lawyers Amit Hadad and Noa Milstein, appealed to the Supreme Court to lift the bans imposed on him by the Israel Police and upheld by Lod District Court Judge Menahem Mizrahi.
The most significant, and, according to Urich’s lawyers, outstanding restriction is the profession ban, which forbids Urich from returning to his former places of employment: The Prime Minister’s Office and the Perception company, which is also connected to the investigations.
As for the other restrictive measures, which were signed into effect for 60 days, until approximately early November, these include a contact ban on anyone connected to the case and a travel ban outside Israel’s borders.
The police’s defense of the employment ban is that of proximity. They said that allowing Urich to return to the place where he allegedly committed crimes would be irresponsible and a threat to state security. An indictment is expected to be filed by the prosecution in the near future.
Urich’s team has said that the police’s narrative is inconsistent and that the treatment by the justice system of Urich is unwarranted, while the police have countered with what they said is proof of grave actions against state security. This process has been played out in several rounds through the legal circuit.
The reason they appealed to the Supreme Court, Urich’s team said, was that the case touches on fundamental issues that have not yet been resolved in jurisprudence, such as the rare application in this case of an employment ban.
They noted on Sunday that the decision by the Lod District Court, which has taken place in this format several times already, “created a faulty and dangerous precedent: Enforcing an employment ban on a suspect – not a defendant – without any evidentiary and factual basis.”
The investigation concerns alleged Qatari influence over figures close to the prime minister, individuals who operated public relations campaigns for the Gulf state while working in close proximity to major Israeli decision-makers.
Allegedly, this revolved around the 2022 World Cup, which took place in Qatar, whereby a presumed campaign to warm the Israeli public up to this state, which has sponsored a terrorist group, Hamas, occurred.
Per reports, streams of funds through third parties made this campaign possible. Qatar’s stakes in the proceedings allegedly rose when Hamas launched the October 7 cross-border massacre attack, the war broke out in Gaza, and Qatar became one of the principal negotiators for ceasefire talks.
Initial arrests of Urich and Feldstein
Urich and former PMO military spokesperson Eli Feldstein were arrested in March in connection with two interconnected cases: Qatargate and “Bild.”
Investigations against Feldstein by the police and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) were initiated in November 2024. In the Bild case, Urich allegedly orchestrated – while Feldstein executed – the illegal leaking of a classified document from the IDF reflecting Hamas’s impressions of the successes of its efforts to influence the Israeli public’s opinion, specifically regarding hostage negotiations.
Feldstein allegedly leaked the document to the German tabloid Bild after permission for its publication was denied by the military censor.
Nevertheless, the documents were eventually published. This was around August 2024, when six hostages were killed by their Hamas captors in a tunnel in Rafah: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Almog Sarusi, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, and Alex Lobanov.