The billboard also displayed photographs of the alleged conspirators. Among them was Eli Feldstein, a thirtysomething with a shaved head, a close-cropped beard, and a look of searching concern. Feldstein’s name had come up when Einhorn and Footlik were looking for someone with sufficient credibility to spread their pro-Qatar messages to journalists. Einhorn had a list of candidates, which included a number of seasoned media specialists—and also Feldstein, who worked as a military-affairs spokesperson for Netanyahu.
Feldstein was relatively young, and he didn’t speak English, but he had already distinguished himself as what Einhorn called a “master communicator.” He grew up in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak and served for a decade as a media operative, working for a time in the chaotic office of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national-security minister. There, he began ingratiating himself with the Prime Minister’s aides. On October 7th, as Hamas militants ravaged communities along Israel’s southern border, he was already managing optics from afar. Feldstein recommended that Netanyahu appear with “no suit, no tie, combat mode,” and demanded that the military spokesman’s office release photos of “soldiers on the ground, with helicopters.” When the photos failed to materialize quickly enough, he griped that members of the unit were “scumbags.”
Feldstein started work in Netanyahu’s office just four days after the attacks. The surroundings weren’t glamorous. In an atmosphere of national panic, the Prime Minister was running most of his operations out of a squat nineteen-fifties building near “the Pit”—the I.D.F.’s underground command center. But, Feldstein said when I met him recently near Tel Aviv, “I was thrilled to work there. I really wanted to prove myself.”
From his first day on the job, he was called on to defend the Prime Minister, Feldstein told me. As he was getting settled, Netanyahu walked by, pointed at a television mounted on his office wall, and asked if reporters were “still talking about responsibility”—his refusal to apologize for the military and intelligence failures that led to the attacks. Feldstein replied that they were. Netanyahu, he says, told him to “do something about it.”
Feldstein’s immediate boss was Netanyahu’s closest strategic adviser, Jonatan Urich. For years, Urich had been a constant presence at the Prime Minister’s side: a bearish man with black-rimmed glasses and an inscrutable smile. Feldstein described him as “Netanyahu’s first phone call in the morning and last phone call before bed.”
Urich had started off in the military press office, where he built a reputation as a social-media whiz. In 2015, he joined Netanyahu’s election campaign and helped secure an unlikely victory. “Jonatan turned negative campaigning into art,” a former senior adviser to Netanyahu told me. “He enjoys watching the other side suffer—really enjoys it.” He was fiercely loyal to the Prime Minister. When Urich was young, his father suffered a disabling stroke; Netanyahu became a father figure to him. “I would let him perform open-heart surgery on me,” Urich once said.
Cartoon by Mick Stevens
During his years working for Netanyahu, Urich also had what amounted to a side hustle, working for Perception. He was able to discreetly hold both jobs because he was paid for his government work as a consultant for Likud. At the same time, he received forty per cent of Perception’s payments from Qatar, through a third-party company founded by former Israeli security officials. (Urich denies any wrongdoing, saying, “I am being targeted because I advise the Prime Minister.” He has claimed that he “never received money on behalf of Qatar in Israel.” Although he doesn’t deny that Qatar paid him eighteen thousand dollars a month through most of 2024, he argues that he was being compensated for the World Cup campaign.)
After a few months in Netanyahu’s office, Feldstein, too, effectively went on Perception’s payroll. In his telling, it was almost accidental. He was hoping for a promotion and a higher salary, but he failed a security clearance because he had previously used drugs. Urich offered him a workaround, Feldstein said: he could receive an increased salary through an intermediary. That intermediary worked with Footlik. (Footlik says he has never sought to hire anyone who worked for the Israeli government, and that the funds he provided were for an effort to secure the release of the hostages. Feldstein argues that he never knew he was working for Qatar—though he and Einhorn referred in text exchanges to the “patients” and the “friends,” with the context clearly indicating Qatar.)