A regional power reportedly urged another Middle Eastern state to reach an agreement with Israel as part of a strategy to “put Israel to sleep” while preparations were made for a larger military confrontation, public broadcaster Kan reported on Monday.
The report, citing sources familiar with the matter, said officials from one country advised their counterparts in another to show flexibility in negotiations with Israel and move toward an agreement, not as an end in itself, but as a way to create time and strategic cover for preparations for war.
According to the report, the officials suggested that the agreement could later be violated once those preparations were complete.
The identities of the two countries were not disclosed, immediately fueling speculation over which regional governments were involved.
Jonatan Urich, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, weighed in Tuesday after adviser Itzik Alrov publicly suggested that Egypt was the country at the center of the report.
Alrov accused Netanyahu of leaking information against “a country in the Middle East,” which he identified as Egypt, in an attempt to damage Cairo’s reputation among Israelis against the backdrop of controversies involving Qatar and the Prime Minister’s Office.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Urich rejected that identification. “It is not Egypt,” he wrote on X.
Urich did not address Alrov’s separate accusation that Netanyahu himself was responsible for leaking the information.
The Kan report did not identify the country allegedly proposing the strategy or the country it was advising, nor did it provide further details about the prospective agreement or the nature and timing of the military confrontation reportedly being discussed.
The central allegation, however, was that diplomacy with Israel was being considered not as a lasting settlement but as a means of lowering Israeli vigilance while military preparations continued in parallel.