Israel’s military censor clears a two-year-old secret: Netanyahu approved a direct phone line to Hamas

On Thursday evening, 27 August, Channel 12 and Kan reported that a direct channel had operated between a senior Shin Bet official, acting for then-agency chief Ronen Bar, and the senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad. Per those reports the channel was approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, on the other side, by Khalil al-Hayya, then deputy to Yahya Sinwar. Contact was strictly by telephone; dozens of calls took place; Bar listened in in real time and, according to Kan, personally spoke with Hamad on several occasions. Contacts intensified after the killing of six hostages in Rafah in August 2024. A source familiar with the channel, quoted by the Times of Israel, credited it with the breakthrough that produced the January 2025 hostage deal.

Ynet reports that Bar briefed cabinet ministers about the channel during 2025, and that publication was barred by the military censor until Thursday, when permission was unexpectedly granted. Separately, and on a thinner evidentiary base, Ben Caspit reported for Channel 12 that Netanyahu ran an earlier covert channel to Hamad during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, using the businessman Shlomi Fogel, a Netanyahu associate, as intermediary — and that Netanyahu was twice confronted by senior security officials and twice said he knew nothing of it, while three generals and the Shin Bet chief were in Cairo conducting the official ceasefire talks. That second strand is a single report, uncorroborated elsewhere in the material reviewed here, and no response from the Prime Minister’s Office or from Fogel appeared in it.

Assessment: The disclosure is not the news. The permission is. A censor that had sat on this for a year released it two months before an election, in a story whose central figure is a Shin Bet chief the prime minister moved to dismiss — and nobody has said who asked, or why now. Treat the “source familiar with the channel” crediting it with the January 2025 deal as an interested party: that is a claim about who deserves credit, not an established fact. The load-bearing detail is Bar’s reported judgement that direct contact worked better than mediated talks. That is a serving intelligence chief’s verdict against the entire Doha–Cairo architecture, and Gulf mediators should read it as such.