Zvika Klein, the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post who was questioned on Monday by police as a suspect in the Qatargate case, described in a long television interview that aired Saturday his journalistic dealings with three current and former aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who are allegedly central to the affair, and the deeply unpleasant circumstances of his questioning.
Speaking to Channel 12 news, Klein held back tears when he recalled undergoing 12 hours of police questioning on Monday, with his phone taken from him. He recounted getting home at midnight, with his wife abroad, and his children asking him in the morning where he had been.
Klein also said he does not believe Netanyahu knows what is going on in his own office — in apparent reference to allegations that aides to the prime minister have worked illicitly for Qatar. He expressed concern he may face retaliation for details he was sharing in the interview on his interactions with individuals tied to the case.
The Qatargate affair involves suspicions that two aides to Netanyahu, senior adviser Jonatan Urich and former spokesman Eli Feldstein, committed multiple offenses tied to their alleged work for a pro-Qatar lobbying firm, including contact with a foreign agent and a series of corruption allegations involving lobbyists and businessmen. Urich is in custody, and Feldstein is under house arrest. Police also want to question a third aide, Yisrael Einhorn, who currently lives in Serbia.
Klein was summoned to give testimony in the case on Monday and then cautioned as a suspect. Other journalists have also given testimony, but only as witnesses. He was initially released to house arrest, but this restriction was canceled on Thursday. He has decried his arrest and denied any involvement in the affair.
In the TV interview, recorded before Shabbat and broadcast Saturday evening, Klein was initially asked about his reporting on Qatar.
He said the entire saga began for him ahead of the soccer World Cup hosted by Qatar in 2022 when he, then a reporter at the Post, wrote an article saying that it was forbidden to take kosher food into Qatar. When the piece was published, Urich, a veteran adviser to Netanyahu, texted him about it.
Klein noted that he has been friends with Urich for years — “I love him.” He also noted that Netanyahu was in the opposition at the time.
Urich told Klein that he had a friend “who works with them” — an apparent reference to the Qataris — and who was troubled by the article, saying that “it was problematic.” Klein said they could send a reaction to the piece and could “send me other things… I want the truth.”
It turned out, Klein went on, that Urich’s friend was Einhorn, whom Klein described as “a very talented guy.” (In October 2024, Einhorn appeared on a Jerusalem Post list of 50 most influential Jews, with a headline describing him as “The strategic mastermind behind Netanyahu’s success.”)
Klein said he subsequently became very interested in Qatar, which was evidently a major regional player, and especially after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre and the November 2023 hostage-truce deal, which Qatar helped broker.
By now editing the Post, Klein said he stepped up his efforts to get journalistic access to the Qataris, and Einhorn, who helped arrange access to other important people, proved able to assist.
Ahead of a Jerusalem Post conference in Germany in early 2024, Einhorn told Klein that while he was not directly connected to the Qataris, he had a friend in England named “Ryan” who worked with them.
Via this contact, it was arranged that the Qatari ambassador to Germany would be interviewed by Klein on stage at the conference. Klein said he rejected a request that the ambassador be awarded a prize. He demanded and secured an onstage promise from the ambassador to bring all the hostages home, Klein said, and the ambassador made the same promise onstage to Meirav Leshem Gonen, whose daughter Romi was released by Hamas three months ago.
“As far as I’m concerned, what I was doing was work [on behalf of the hostages] that sanctified God,” Klein told Channel 12.
He said his 2024 visit to Qatar, during which he interviewed the country’s prime minister, came after he pushed for access via Einhorn, who in turn connected him to Jay Footlik, a US lobbyist who has emerged as a central figure in the Qatargate probe. Klein said he met Footlik in a Tel Aviv hotel to discuss the potential trip, and later flew to Qatar for three days, during which Footlik, who he called “a wonderful man,” escorted him and was his “babysitter.”
After he wrote up the trip in The Jerusalem Post and Hebrew publications Walla! and Maariv, Klein said, several of his colleagues wrote critical articles about the trip and his pieces. Einhorn suggested he go on television to discuss the visit, but Klein said he didn’t want to self-promote, especially during the war.
Einhorn then told him of “a guy called Eli Feldstein” who would help him.
“I said, who is he, a PR guy? They said, ‘He’ll help you,'” Klein recalled. He said Einhorn told him not to tell Feldstein that he had put Klein in touch with him.
Klein said it turns out he had texted Feldstein once in the past, when Feldstein was a spokesman for far-right politician Itamar Ben Gvir, and Feldstein hadn’t answered his SMS.
Klein said he told Einhorn he didn’t have a budget to arrange interviews, and that Einhorn told him to tell Feldstein that someone from the US would take care of paying him. He said he called Feldstein and had a very short discussion — “I understand today that apparently he knew all about this” — and that Feldstein said he didn’t need money. Klein indeed then gave interviews about his trip on both Channel 12 and Channel 13.
Asked how he found himself under investigation by police, Klein indicated he believes the episode would have created more of a furor if he had been the editor of a different outlet — apparently referring to major Hebrew-language outlets.
He noted that his phone was taken from him on Monday — and that he had still not gotten it back. He was currently borrowing his neighbor’s daughter’s phone, he said.
“By speaking to you, I have burned a lot of journalistic connections. I’ll pay a price — people will want to get back at me,” he told the TV interviewers.
“I want the truth to come out,” he added. “And as time passes, I realize I don’t know all the truth.”
He repeated his previously stated insistence that “I got no benefits,” from the Qatar trip. “Nobody offered me any benefits.”
Asked who had paid for his flight to Qatar, Klein said, “They paid for the flight,” apparently referring to the Qataris. He noted that he wrote in his articles that he was invited to Doha by the Qatari government. He stressed that he was not paid by Qatar for the articles.
When he was called in for questioning, his wife was abroad because her mother had died, he said, and he was responsible for collecting his kids from school. He thought he would be testifying for a few hours, but in fact, “I got home at midnight.”
The neighbors looked after the kids, he said. When the kids asked him in the morning where he had been, Klein said, fighting back tears, that he told them, “I was helping the police.”
Having moved to Israel with his family from Chicago aged three, Klein repeated that he truly does not regret it, and said there are “wonderful people” in Israel, and that people from all spheres have contacted him to give him support.
At this point, Channel 12 interviewer Ben Caspit looked into the camera and told Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara that “if there’s nothing here that we don’t know,” she owes Klein an apology.
Klein was asked to try to explain Qatargate “as a commentator,” to which he replied: “I don’t know all the facts… I want to be careful… I can’t expose testimonies that I saw.”
When he was first questioned, before he was cautioned and his phone was taken, he said, “I offered to show them everything in my phone… I thought I knew everything.”
But from what he has since seen, he has realized, “F*ck, God almighty… There’s a problem here. It’s not [a question of] right and left.”
Klein was asked: Doesn’t Netanyahu know what’s going on his office? He replied, “I don’t have enough information. In my opinion, no.”
He was then asked, “And Urich?”
Klein replied, “I really hope not. I truly don’t know… I really love him… He’s a complicated guy… Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but truly, since 2022, [as regards my journalistic interactions on Qatar], his name did not come up with me.”