""Hurt, broken and upset": Eli Feldstein's conversation with his family

November 20, 2024   

The Shin Bet last night (Tuesday) authorized Eli Fedelstein, the spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office for Military Affairs, who is suspected in the 'document leak' affair, to have a phone call with his parents - ahead of the indictment that will be filed against him tomorrow. According to a report by media person Yinon Magal, the parents described the call as "difficult and painful." In addition, they were allowed to bring him clothes and cigarettes to the detention cell, but were prohibited from bringing in a tallit and a painting that his nephews had prepared for him. According to a report on the Ynet website, in the short conversation between Eli and his mother, he told her about daily, prolonged interrogations that add up to dozens of hours. According to him, during the interrogations he was connected to a polygraph and went through "mental and physical torment," as he put it. It was also learned that since he was arrested, according to his relatives, he has been wearing the same clothes. In addition, it was alleged that even when the family was asked to bring him clothes, his relatives were detained outside the detention facility for hours and were finally sent home. According to Ynet, they provided Feldstein wore tefillin, but due to concerns about suicide, he did not receive the tallit. In recordings published on Channel 12 about the conversation between Feldstein and his family, they say: "He cries a lot, is in pain, broken and upset." He painfully told his family, after almost a month of complete isolation: "I will never be able to describe to you what I have been going through in the past month. I chose the path in which I was required to serve the country that I love - and not the path of evasion. In the end, they turned me from a hero, a salt of the earth - into an enemy of Israel." This morning, another suspect in the affair, a reservist suspected of passing the document from the Military Intelligence Service, was also allowed to speak with his wife. On Monday, prison guards from the Prison Service found in the cell of Feldstein, who has been detained for more than three weeks, findings that "required his immediate transfer to a suicide prevention observation cell." The IPS statement, which defined Feldstein as a "security detainee," reads: "Prisoners found evidence in the cell of a security detainee in a prison in the south that required, in accordance with the directive of the Commissioner of Prisons, his immediate transfer to a surveillance cell to prevent suicide. As with any such incident, the background and circumstances are protected by personal privacy." Those close to the Feldstein family said that he is being held in a wing where only Arab terrorists are imprisoned - and that he is the only Jew among the 15 inmates in the wing. The IPS emphasized that it was not a hanging rope but a rubber band that the detainee pulled out of the window. In addition, according to the IPS, Feldstein is staying in a national isolation cell for criminal and non-security prisoners. Avital, the wife of the detained reservist, and his mother Tehila, appeared on Channel 14's "The Patriots" program on Sunday, hosted by Yinon Magal, for a moving interview, during which the turmoil of emotions was evident on the faces of the two. The daughter and mother talked about their lives since the affair broke out - and what the detained reservist has been going through for 3 weeks. The soldier's mother-in-law described: "Today we mark three weeks from the moment our lives were turned upside down, we have no day and no night. It's such a process that within these 3 weeks we have an emotional roller coaster, that you can't even feel what it feels like, this feeling of injustice and wrongdoing. Today we can make our voices heard, we haven't spoken up until now out of fear." His wife Avital spoke about the moments of the arrest: "5 am, knocking on the door, three masked men with big guns break into our house, into the bedroom, at that moment October 7th is happening in my room, I threw up my hands and thought it was terrorists. At that moment I told my husband that maybe they were working on us, and at that moment he told me 'OK' and calmed me down. They took him to the other end of the house and from that moment on I didn't speak to him. He helped them find things they were looking for. What were they looking for? They wanted all kinds of documents and he helped them, they took a CD-ROM of our wedding, of my studies." Tehila described the detainee's character: "Anyone who knows my groom, he is the most statesmanlike, normative, mainstream person. He runs away from dramas the most, doesn't seek attention, hides behind the dishes. All this drama has nothing to do with him. This man has been in the reserves for 10 years, the most patriotic of all." "As part of his reserves," his mother-in-law said about the document being forwarded to the Prime Minister's Office, "he was exposed to material related to the abductees. You have to understand that the abductees were in his blood, he lived it. For example, he took it upon himself not to raise 'cheers' in the synagogue until the abductees returned. And when he was exposed to this information, he simply knew that it was very important that the political echelon see it. "He is not a political person, it was not of concern to the Prime Minister, he simply took responsibility for himself. He contacted the Prime Minister's military spokesman, because in his opinion this was the way to reach the political echelon - and that, as far as he was concerned, was the end of his lot. He was not interested in any personal gain, no desire to reach the media, he felt he had responsibility for this because it was in his blood." His wife Avital added: "After October 7, he was in the reserves in the south and would return disintegrated, simply disintegrated. The story with the 8200 counterattack simply shook his world and he kept asking me, 'How did this happen, how did this happen?'” Tehila: "From the moment he was taken from the house until the moment a lawyer came into the picture and after that moment, my son-in-law gave the same version over and over again - which means he is telling the truth. So why is he still there? Why this separation of families? He has a two-and-a-half-year-old baby at home. Why are they burying him there? Why isn't he at least under house arrest?". So how do you explain what's happening here? Tehila: "That it's 700 times bigger than us, there are motivations and forces here that we simply don't know how to imagine. I think we've stumbled upon something that has nothing to do with him, he's a political victim, there's no other explanation for it.".