The Israel Defense Forces have launched an investigation into claims in the Israeli media that the London-based Jewish Chronicle published stories based on “fabricated intelligence” relating to Hamas, amid claims that they may have been planted as part of a disinformation campaign.
Among the most controversial claims published by the Jewish Chronicle, the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, was the suggestion last week that the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, might be preparing to flee to Iran with Israeli hostages, a suggestion that has also been made by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Jewish Chronicle article is one of several sensational reports that have been written in recent months by a writer bylined as Elon Perry, whose résumé claiming he has worked as a journalist, academic and served as an elite undercover soldier has also been questioned.
Checks by the Guardian have found no evidence of any record of significant stories published by Perry as a reporter in English or Hebrew, except for the recent series of articles in the Jewish Chronicle now alleged to be fabrications.
Perry’s articles for the paper in recent months have included what was claimed to be a detailed depiction of the killing of the Hamas politburo chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, the veracity of which has now been questioned.
Commenting on the claims on Thursday, the Jewish Chronicle, which still has the stories on its website, said in a statement: “The Jewish Chronicle is aware of allegations concerning a freelance journalist, which we take very seriously.
“The Jewish Chronicle is the oldest Jewish newspaper in the world and has always maintained the highest standards of reporting and integrity. An investigation is under way and there will be an update in due course.”
Most controversial was the story citing Israeli “intelligence sources” claiming that Sinwar, Hamas’s fugitive leader, intended to smuggle surviving hostages out of Gaza to Iran and accompany them, a story at first picked up by a number of Israeli outlets.
Asked about the claim, the IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said he was unaware of any intelligence that Sinwar planned to flee with the hostages.
The Jewish Chronicle’s report suggested that Netanyahu’s claim was based on the interrogation of a captured senior Hamas official as well as documents found at the same time as the discovery of the bodies of six Israeli hostages killed by Hamas in Gaza, claims denied by Israel officials.
Within days a number of publications including the Israeli outlets Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth, and the Israeli-Palestinian website +972 were quoting their own security sources suggesting that the claims – and previous stories by Perry – appeared to be made up.
Israeli reporters and commentators have also pointed to the fact that the story in the Jewish Chronicle appeared to put flesh on the bones of claims made by Netanyahu only a day earlier to justify Israeli troops remaining in the Philadelphi corridor on the border with Egypt. He told a press conference that a military withdrawal meant Israel would not be able to stop Hamas smuggling hostages out of Gaza. “They disappear in the Sinai and then they end up in Iran or in Yemen. They’re gone for ever,” he said.
That in turn has led some in Israel to suggest that the story – and others – may have been planted to influence the domestic debate in Israel around the hostage negotiations.
Prominent in questioning the Jewish Chronicle account has been Ronen Bergman, Israel’s best-known reporter covering intelligence and security. He was part of the New York Times’s Pulitzer prize-winning team for its coverage of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October last year.
Writing in Yedioth Ahronoth, Bergman said his own sources had described the Jewish Chronicle’s claims about Sinwar and the hostages as a “wild fabrication”.
Bergman also quoted a high-ranking IDF official in the hostages and missing persons department, who described a “malicious, vicious and diabolical” campaign to “disseminate to the international media documents that either are fabricated or which were severely distorted”.
The official was quoted as saying: “It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to understand what a report like that does to the heart of every hostage’s father, mother and wife. That is downright abuse, and only supposedly to validate narrow and selfish political calculations.”
While it remains unclear who has been briefing the stories to the Jewish Chronicle, the row over the stories has also focused attention on Elon Perry.
He is described in his online biography for the paper as “a former commando soldier of the elite Golani Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces, which he served in for 28 years”.
He is also described as having been “a journalist for 25 years covering wars and terrorist attacks”, who since 2010 “has been lecturing in the UK and USA about the 100 years of terror in the Middle East”.
The Guardian has emailed Perry for comment.
However, when he was confronted this week in a recorded phone call by a journalist from the HaTzinor current affairs programme, Perry appeared to concede in an angry exchange that, contrary to his claims, he had never worked as a political science professor at Tel Aviv University, which had no record of him.
HaTzinor also said it had debunked his claim elsewhere to have participated in the Israeli hostage rescue mission to Entebbe in 1976, and questioned his assertion that he served in an elite undercover unit at a time when he would have been 58.
The Jewish Chronicle report was amplified on social media by Netanyahu’s son Yair, while several days after it first appeared Netanyahu’s wife repeated the claim that hostages could be taken to Iran, in a meeting with hostage relatives.
