Israeli television reports Netanyahu ran back-channels to Hamas in 2014 and again in 2025

The two strands ran the same night. Ynet’s write-up of the Thursday broadcasts said Netanyahu authorised then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar in 2025 to maintain a direct channel with Hamas officials abroad to advance a hostage deal, and that Bar told cabinet ministers the channel helped break a deadlock in the talks. A separate report by the journalist Ben Caspit said Netanyahu had also operated a secret channel during the 2014 Gaza war, using the Israeli businessman Shlomi Fogel to relay messages to the senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad. The Jerusalem Post stressed what made the 2014 contacts unusual: they bypassed Egypt, Qatar or any other intermediary. Even Netanyahu’s later exchanges with Yahya Sinwar — including the note reading “Take a calculated risk”, sent to then-National Security Council chief Meir Ben Shabbat — went through Cairo.

The most checkable element is a sequence of confrontations. Per the Times of Israel’s summary of Channel 12’s follow-up, senior security officials went to Netanyahu about Fogel’s activities; he said he knew Fogel but was unaware of any talks and had not dispatched him, and encouraged them to summon Fogel and tell him to stop. Fogel, summoned, said he was “doing this with authorization and permission”. Intelligence within days indicated the contacts were continuing. The officials returned; Netanyahu again said he knew nothing, then telephoned Yossi Cohen, at the time head of the National Security Council. A senior security figure, unnamed in the syndicated Jerusalem Post copy, said: “He appointed all of us; he sent us to conduct negotiations in Cairo, and at the same time he was conducting direct negotiations with Hamas without us knowing about it.” Netanyahu and Fogel both denied the report.

Assessment: Two competing broadcasters running the same story on the same night indicates a coordinated briefing from people who were in the room in 2014, not an independent confirmation of it. Everything here rests on Israeli television investigative work, one named journalist and unnamed former security officials, against an on-the-record PMO denial: claimed, not established. The censorship sub-plot is Channel 12’s own inference about its own treatment, and the network hedged it explicitly, saying it did not know whether the military censor acted of her own volition or was told to. Note where the political charge actually sits: the 2025 Bar channel, if real, retroactively legitimises the 2014 one — which is precisely why Channel 12 aired them together.