A magistrate’s court on Thursday canceled restrictive conditions imposed on three senior aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Bild leak affair, with the presiding judge delivering sharp criticism of police conduct and describing the requests as procedurally flawed, overbroad, and untethered to the legal framework governing the case.
Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court President Judge Menachem Mizrahi rejected Israel Police requests to extend employment bans, no-contact orders, and travel restrictions against Netanyahu adviser Yonatan Urich, Prime Minister’s Office spokesman Omer Mantzur, and Chief of Staff Tzachi Braverman.
The ruling will take effect Sunday, allowing police time to appeal to the district court.
In a lengthy decision, Mizrahi faulted police for what he characterized as shifting, inconsistent, and legally unsound applications - noting that investigators repeatedly sought to impose conditions that either had already expired, were never authorized by a court, or stemmed from unrelated investigative tracks.
“At this stage,” Mizrahi wrote, “the requested conditions lack a proper factual and legal foundation,” adding that the court could not approve restrictions “created ex-nihilo” without a clear judicial basis.
Central to the ruling was the judge’s conclusion that police improperly blurred - and at times conflated - separate investigations, including the Bild leak, the so-called “nighttime parking lot meeting,” and other parallel probes involving the PMO.
Mizrahi emphasized that conditions imposed in one case could not be mechanically transferred to another after they had been explicitly severed by higher courts.
“This is not a matter of semantics,” he wrote. “Once the district court disentangled the cases, the legal justification for extending the conditions collapsed accordingly.”
What is the Bild leak affair?
The Bild leak investigation concerns the alleged unauthorized transfer of a classified IDF intelligence document to the German newspaper Bild, which published material outlining Hamas’s position on hostage negotiations during the war.
Authorities allege the document was used to influence public discourse at a sensitive stage of the conflict, raising concerns about obstruction of justice and the misuse of classified information.
Mizrahi was particularly critical of the scope of police no-contact requests, which at various points sought to bar communication with “all employees of the Prime Minister’s Office,” and - in some filings - even with the prime minister himself.
Such demands, the judge noted, were submitted without a concrete evidentiary showing and only clarified after repeated court intervention. “A prohibition of this breadth,” he wrote, “cannot rest on generalized suspicions or undefined investigative needs.”
The decision also highlighted timing failures, with Mizrahi pointing to long gaps between investigative steps and warning that claims of urgent obstruction risks were undermined by police inaction.
In one passage, he observed that investigators relied heavily on a televised interview to launch the probe, only later seeking raw materials that should have been examined at the outset.
“Law enforcement cannot run ahead to impose sweeping restrictions,” Mizrahi wrote, “and only afterward assemble the procedural scaffolding meant to support them.”
While Mizrahi acknowledged that a minimal threshold of suspicion existed with respect to Urich, he concluded that its evidentiary weight was insufficient to justify ongoing restrictions.
As for Mantzur and Braverman, the judge ruled that the suspicion level fell below even that low bar, describing the case against them as reliant almost entirely on inconsistent statements by a single source.
The ruling comes amid a broader pattern in which courts have repeatedly curtailed or overturned police requests in the affair, often citing missed deadlines, procedural overreach, or inadequate justification. Earlier this month, a district court allowed separate Qatargate-related restrictions on Urich to lapse after police failed to file on time.
The Qatargate investigation, which is being conducted separately from the Bild leak affair, centers on allegations that senior advisers to Netanyahu - including Urich - maintained undisclosed financial or professional ties to Qatar-linked figures while promoting messaging aligned with Qatari interests during the war, despite Qatar’s longstanding relationship with Hamas. Urich has denied any wrongdoing.
Courts have repeatedly emphasized the need to distinguish between the two investigations, warning police against relying on allegations or restrictions from one case to justify measures in the other.
In January, a court ruled that police had missed a statutory deadline to extend Qatargate-related restrictions on Urich, causing those conditions to expire - a procedural failure that Mizrahi referenced in his decision as part of a broader pattern of investigative overreach.
Police may still appeal Mizrahi’s decision. Until then, the cancellation of the conditions clears the way for the three aides to renew contact and - potentially - return to work at the Prime Minister’s Office.