Why have five been arrested over leaked Hamas documents in Israel?

A fresh political storm has engulfed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the arrest of a number of people in connection with an alleged leak of classified documents from his office.

The documents in question are alleged to be Hamas military strategy documents, found by Israeli military intelligence in Gaza and subsequently manipulated by suspects within, or close to, the prime minister’s office and defence establishment. The documents are then said to have been leaked to the German newspaper, Bild, and the UK’s Jewish Chronicle, just as a potential ceasefire deal for Gaza, which ultimately failed, was being hammered out in September this year.

It is unclear how changes to these documents might have been made, however they are believed to have made it appear that Hamas intended to smuggle the Israeli captives held in Gaza to Egypt and then to either Iran or Yemen.

Among the five arrested on suspicion of leaking and manipulating the intelligence is the prime minister’s spokesperson, Eli Feldstein.

Announcing the arrests on Friday, an Israeli court in Rishon LeTsiyon said a joint investigation by the army, police and Israel’s internal security services, the Shin Bet, had led them to suspect a “breach of national security caused by the unlawful provision of classified information”, which had also “harmed the achievement of Israel’s war aims”.

The leak, judge Menachem Mizrahi said – lifting parts of the previous gag order that had limited reporting – posed a risk to “sensitive information and intelligence sources”, and harmed efforts to achieve “the goals of the war in the Gaza Strip”.

Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing by members of his office and, according to a statement issued on Saturday, claims he was only made aware of the leaked document via the media.

“This is big,” Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster and former political aide to several senior Israeli political figures, including Netanyahu, told media.

“This is potentially worse than Watergate, which is ironically the hotel Netanyahu stayed in on his last visit to Washington,” he added, referencing the residence that gave its name to the scandal of the early 1970s which brought down US President Richard Nixon.