Key Qatargate suspect Jonatan Urich and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke for the first time in a year by telephone on Tuesday morning, after restrictions on Urich’s activities expired two days earlier.

The conversation took place before a hearing in the Central District Court, where Judge Ami Kobo rejected a police appeal of the Rishon Lezion Magistrate Court’s decision not to extend the restrictions on Urich, including contacting those connected to the Qatargate affair, such as Netanyahu.

Urich, along with former Netanyahu spokesman Eli Feldstein and ex-campaign adviser Yisrael Einhorn, is accused of taking money to spearhead a public relations campaign to cast Qatar in a positive light for over a year after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, despite the Gulf state’s strong ties to the terror group, and doing so while working in the PMO.

Police, in their initial request for the extension on Urich’s restrictions, had said that allowing him, formerly one of the premier’s closest aides, to resume working in the Prime Minister’s Office would be to allow him to “return to the scene of the crime.”

But Kobo rejected the appeal since, as the lower court pointed out, the police requested the extension........

© The Times of Israel