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

The documents in question are said to be Hamas military strategy documents, found by Israeli military intelligence in Gaza and then manipulated by suspects within or close to the prime minister’s office and the defense establishment. The documents were then allegedly leaked to the German newspaper Bild and Britain’s Jewish Chronicle just as a possible Gaza ceasefire was agreed in September this year, which ultimately failed.

It is unclear how changes were made to these documents, but it is believed that they created the impression that Hamas planned to smuggle the Israeli prisoners held in Gaza to Egypt and then to Iran or Yemen.

The prime minister’s spokesman, Eli Feldstein, is among the five arrested on suspicion of leaking and manipulating intelligence.

Announcing the arrests on Friday, an Israeli court in Rishon LeTsiyon said a joint investigation by the military, police and Israel’s internal security services, the Shin Bet, had led them to suspect a “violation of national security, caused by unlawfully providing secret information”. ”, which had also “damaged the achievement of Israel’s war objectives”.

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

Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing by members of his office, claiming he was only informed of the leaked document through the media, according to a statement issued Saturday.

How big is this?

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

“This is potentially worse than Watergate, which ironically is the hotel Netanyahu stayed in during his last visit to Washington,” he added, referring to the residence that took its name from the early 1970s scandal that pitted the US president brought down Richard Nixon.

“We don’t know where this will end. We don’t know how (Eli Feldstein) got so close to the center of power after failing to obtain proper security clearances.”

Barak continued: “We do know, however, that this whole thing has endangered our soldiers, the hostages (in Gaza) and whatever intelligence sources our military has there and that is a big problem.”

What is the motive behind this leak?

Many observers, including Netanyahu’s critics within Israel, have accused the prime minister of deliberately prolonging the war for his purposes.

In September, Yair Lapid, echoing the sentiment of fellow opposition leader Benny Gantz a month earlier, called the Gaza massacre an “eternal war” that was destined to continue as long as Netanyahu and his government remained in power.

The families of prisoners trapped in Gaza have routinely accused the prime minister of dragging out the war, sounding an air raid siren outside his home last month and announcing a series of rallies to take place next Saturday calling for a permanent ceasefire -the-fire. relatives returned home.

Even the leader of Israel’s closest ally, US President Joe Biden, expressed frustration over Netanyahu’s evasion of ceasefire terms, telling Time magazine in June that there was “every reason” to believe that Netanyahu dragged out the war for his political purposes.

Netanyahu has been charged in two cases with fraud and breach of trust, and in a third with bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Lawyers representing the prime minister have repeatedly called for court hearings to be postponed due to Netanyahu’s role as a wartime leader.

However, to remain leader in wartime, Netanyahu must also maintain the support of his coalition cabinet, where hardliners such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich will be satisfied with nothing less than an outright victory in Gaza – which means that they would do the same. not agree to a ceasefire – and possibly the expulsion of the population.

Following a series of provocative statements on Gaza, Britain is said to be considering imposing sanctions on Smotrich after he suggested that starving the Gaza population could be justified, while Ben-Gvir, who is also in line for sanctions because he calls the violent settlers in the West Bank “heroes”, has also spoken about the resettlement of Gaza, after the “voluntary migration” of the population.

In October, after the assassination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, whose support Netanyahu needs to maintain his fractious coalition cabinet, called for an increase in military pressure on the enclave, where Israel has already killed more than 43,000 people.

“Now the IDF (Israeli Army) must ensure that there is no resident of Gaza who does not know that Sinwar is dead. It should increase the intense military pressure in the Strip while providing safe passage and financial reward to those who return our hostages and agree to lay down their arms and leave the Strip,” Smotrich wrote on X, according to a report. in The Times of Israel.

Ben-Gvir was equally outspoken, calling on Israel to “persevere with all our strength until absolute victory.”

Was a ceasefire agreement in Gaza imminent in September?

Observers believed so.

In early September, Hamas confirmed that it was willing to commit in June to American proposals for a cessation of fighting without “new conditions.”

The American proposal, which envisioned a three-phase wind-down of the war, leading to a permanent ceasefire and prisoner exchanges, was outright rejected by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir just days after it was issued. Both ministers threatened to leave the cabinet and topple the government if the Biden deal was accepted.

In late August, Netanyahu, supported by much of his cabinet, introduced maintaining control of the Philadelphi Corridor (the strip of land between Gaza and Egypt, which is not mentioned in the US proposal) as an essential condition for any peace deal.

To justify this condition, Netanyahu told two press conferences in Hebrew and English on September 4 that Hamas could “easily smuggle hostages into the Sinai Desert” and from there to “Iran or… Yemen.” Then, he added, “they are gone forever.”

The next day, Britain’s oldest Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, published an “exclusive” story that, according to analysts who spoke to media outlet +972, appeared to be based entirely on the doctored documents. These appeared to confirm Hamas’s alleged plans to smuggle both the prisoners and much of its leadership out of Gaza, exactly as the Israeli prime minister had proposed a day earlier.

Hamas’s plan, The Jewish Chronicle reported in an article that has since been removed from its website, “was reportedly revealed during the interrogation of a captured senior Hamas official, as well as through information obtained from documents seized on Thursday, August 29 were taken, the day six bodies of the murdered hostages were recovered.”

What does this mean for Gaza?

By September 11, around the date when a ceasefire would have been possible, Israel had killed 41,020 people in its war against Gaza. That now stands at 43,341.

Conditions in northern Gaza, currently under an Israeli siege that began about a month after the amended documents were published in European newspapers in September, have become so dire that UN chiefs called them “apocalyptic.”

“People have died as a result,” Mairav ​​Zonszein, senior Israel analyst at the NGO, the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera. “In addition to the thousands of Palestinians who have been killed, there are also the soldiers and hostages who have died as a result of the failure to reach a ceasefire agreement.”

Representatives of the families of the remaining prisoners in Gaza told reporters that news of the altered Hamas documents represented “a moral low point that has no depth. This is a fatal damage to the remnants of trust between the government and its citizens.”

Will this scandal affect Netanyahu in any way?

Probably not.

Before the current trial, there have been allegations of corruption and illegal behavior involving the prime minister and his family.

In 2017, his personal lawyer and cousin, David Shimron, was accused of bribing German officials to part with submarines and other naval vessels.

In 2018, his wife Sara was convicted of misusing public funds, while his son Yair Netanyahu found himself on the losing side in several lawsuits for defamation and libel. These ranged from his untrue accusations in 2000 that a woman, Dana Cassidy, was having an affair with his father’s main political rival, Benny Gantz, to the accusation that he had insulted MK Stav Shaffir in a series of social media posts in 2022 after she had done that. criticized his father for apparently violating the country’s COVID quarantine laws.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by some margin.

Furthermore, while this current crisis may seem enormously damaging, there is so far no evidence of a direct link between Netanyahu and the doctored documents.

“However, the issue of hostages is incredibly sensitive for people,” former Israeli ambassador and Netanyahu critic Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera. “If actual evidence emerges that he lied and cheated at the expense of the hostages, it will be bad for him,” he said, before warning that both Israel and Netanyahu had been here before.

“He has an office of low-level sycophants who will probably take the fall for him,” he said of those, like Eli Feldstein, who have already been arrested, “and an opposition that, like penguins in the zoo, occasionally then comes out. and then, as they did this weekend” – when opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz held a joint press conference – “sneeze and then return to their cave.”