The Senior Appointments Advisory Committee must reconvene to fill in the missing parts of its recommendation of IDF Maj.-Gen. Ronen Gofman, and submit an updated opinion within one week.
The decision, issued by a three-panel composed of Justices Dafna Barak-Erez, Ofer Grosskopf, and Alex Stein, serves as an interim decision that could shed light on what information was known to Gofman and when, and, most importantly, whether a breach of public integrity applied to the Mossad chief candidate.
On Monday, the High Court of Justice ordered that the classified affidavit submitted by Brig.-Gen. “G” in the petitions against Gofman’s appointment as Mossad chief should be transferred, without delay, to the relevant respondents who hold the proper security clearance – in this case, the government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Gofman denies involving minor in IDF operation
The petitions focus in part on the Ori Elmakayes affair, involving claims that Elmakayes, who was then a minor, was used in an IDF-linked influence operation connected to the 210th Division while Gofman commanded it.
G’s affidavit was later declassified, revealing that he told the High Court of Justice that incoming Gofman denied in 2022 having approved the transfer of intelligence materials from his division to Telegram channels.
G said he did not know at the time who stood behind the Telegram pages, and was not aware of Elmakayes’s name or his connection to them. For that reason, he wrote, Elmakayes’s name did not come up in the conversation. That point appears to narrow the dispute around whether Gofman was asked directly about Elmakayes himself.
