From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Likud MK Gotliv implies, without evidence, that IDF personnel are being killed for revealing military’s failures on Oct. 7
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Firebrand Likud lawmaker Tally Gotliv appears to imply without evidence that an IDF serviceman who died had been killed for attempting to prevent the revelation of details relating to the military’s response on October 7.
In a post on X yesterday, Gotliv shared an article about the apparent suicide of an IDF intelligence officer who fell from a window in 2022, writing: “If I fall from a building like this by accident, or if an air conditioner falls on me in the middle of nowhere, don’t be surprised and don’t believe that I probably committed suicide.”
“Also, all kinds of IDF officers who somehow tried to tell or expose something related to the October inferno also died suddenly like this,” she wrote. “What’s going on here?”
The article, published in the Israel Hayom daily in May 2022, predates October 7 by nearly a year and a half.
The article stated that the officer in question was believed to have committed suicide and noted that he had served in the same unit as another officer who had been arrested over alleged security offenses and was later found dead in prison. The article stated that there was no apparent connection between the two cases.
Gotliv subsequently wrote that she had been informed the article was from three years ago.
“I do not delete posts, and whenever I make a mistake or fall into a general error, I add a clarification,” she wrote in a follow-up post, but continued to maintain that “anyone who tries, even tries to point the finger of blame at the top brass of the IDF and the Shin Bet for the murder of our people will be harmed.”
To back up her assertion, she points to the arrest of IDF reservist non-commissioned officer Ari Rosenfeld, who is at the center of the Prime Minister’s Office security documents scandal, and the recent interrogation of Brig. Gen. (res.) Oren Solomon, an officer who was involved in the Gaza Division’s probe into its failures related to Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Channel 12 news reported last week that Solomon, a member of the hawkish HaBithonistim group, told associates that he believes he was removed from reserve duty because he found fault in the IDF’s top command. The army said that Solomon worked on the probe for a year with full support and that the end of his reserve service was unrelated to the probe and was connected to unspecified “severe operational security violations.”
“By the way, so far I have not found any investigative findings about the deaths of the officers mentioned” in the article, Gotliv continued. “Keep calling me conspiratorial, and I’ll keep saying I have no doubt that there was betrayal in our midst.”
Gotliv has a history of peddling conspiracy theories. In January, she rebuffed a summons for police questioning, citing parliamentary immunity, in a case related to a series of social media posts a year ago in which she revealed that a protest leader’s life partner was a member of the Shin Bet security service, which security officials said posed a risk to national security.
Several days later, Yair Golan, the head of the left-wing Democrats party threatened to bring legal action against Gotliv for alleged defamation over her attempt to link him to a conspiracy theory involving spying against the state in the aftermath of October 7, 2023.
The Times of Israel Community.