Channel 12 Tries Braverman on Air Before the Attorney General Has Decided

On Monday evening, Channel 12's main newscast aired what it billed as a "first publication" of new details from the Lahav 433 investigation into Tzachi Braverman, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The suspicion: in the month after the October 7 massacre, Braverman systematically gathered about 30 classified protocols, all from the period before October 7, without authorization and contrary to accepted procedure. The documents allegedly covered Gaza and meetings with security chiefs about Hamas, including discussions of the security cabinet, and were reportedly taken for "the battle over the narrative." The file is now pending the Attorney General's decision on whether to indict.

The allegation is serious and deserves a serious legal process. Removing classified material without authorization, if proven, is not a matter to wave away, and nothing here is a defense of the alleged conduct. But the process is precisely what is missing. The Attorney General has not decided. No indictment exists. Yet the public has been handed the content of the investigation file in installments, and the installments come from the same newsroom: the night before, reporter Yaron Avraham published transcripts concerning alleged forgery of protocols and a "renovation call with the stenographer."

The sequence is worth reading closely. Sunday: transcripts of the stenographer's-room conversation, in which Braverman allegedly asked to move a log entry from 06:40 to 06:29 so it would appear Netanyahu received the full operational report the moment Hamas attacked. Monday: the classified-protocols collection, introduced as a revelation that makes the previous night "only the tip of the iceberg." Each broadcast is framed as a first. Each escalates the last. Each lands before any prosecutor has weighed the evidence.

The Monday report also leans on a witness whose account is already part of the public campaign: Maj. Gen. Avi Gil, the prime minister's former military secretary, who told Channel 12 that the gathering of protocols began "two or three weeks into the war" and that at the end of October several people told him an unusual collection effort was under way, "contrary to procedure." That is testimony, offered in a television interview, and it should be treated as an account to be tested in a legal proceeding, not as a verdict delivered in a studio.

## The pipeline is the story

Here the argument moves from fact to interpretation, and it should be labeled as such. A Lahav 433 investigation is supposed to produce a file for prosecutors. What the public is seeing instead is the file's contents, evidence and testimony, flowing steadily to a single newsroom in a form designed for prime-time impact. We do not know who supplied the material, and no one should claim to. What can be said is that the timing and cadence suggest a channel between the investigation and the studio, and that this channel opens, in this case, for a right-wing aide.

The test is symmetry. When a senior figure close to the other side of the political map sits in a file awaiting the Attorney General, are the transcripts, the protocol counts and the "tip of the iceberg" headlines delivered in nightly episodes? Anyone who follows Israeli media knows the answer is rarely yes. Detailed investigative material reaches the screen selectively, and selection is a form of power.

The practical effect is that Braverman has been tried in public opinion on two consecutive evenings, while the one authority empowered to decide whether there is a case has yet to speak. If the Attorney General declines to indict, or the evidence proves thinner than the broadcasts implied, no correction will undo the two nights of framing. If she does indict, the trial will begin with a jury of viewers already instructed.

The allegation about 30 protocols should be investigated to its end, and the answer should come from the legal system. The question for the public, and for the right, is who controls the flow of that investigation to the screen, and why a story about the handling of classified material is itself being handled as a leak.