Security cabinet officials said to suspect IDF source regularly leaking info to Smotrich

Officials in the high-level security cabinet suspect that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has a source in the IDF regularly leaking information to him, Kan news reported Sunday.

Citing sources in the cabinet and the defense establishment, the outlet reported that Smotrich has shown up to security cabinet meetings with specific information on plans from the IDF’s Southern Command, some of which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not even know.

Smotrich is a minister in the Defense Ministry in addition to his role as finance minister, in charge of settlement affairs in the West Bank.

“We saw Smotrich show up sometimes at cabinet meetings with printed presentations from the army, and present information that was not revealed in the cabinet,” says a cabinet source.

The sources named Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Winner, who commands the operational planning team in the Southern Command, as the likely leaker. Winner, a former aide de camp to ex-IDF chief Gabi Ashkenazi, was accused over a decade ago of illegally collecting and secretly distributing materials aimed at defaming IDF officials as well as senior politicians as part of an internal succession battle.

During the 2014 Gaza war, Winner was also accused of feeding information to Naftali Bennett, then a political partner of Smotrich, about IDF deployments and findings via an unapproved backchannel.

Responding to the report, Smotrich said in a statement: “Not only does the minister admit that he comes prepared for cabinet discussions – he is proud of it. Smotrich maintains continuous dialogue with soldiers and officers, both past and present, studies scenarios, listens to ideas, and brings them to cabinet discussions.

“Looking for ‘the mole’? Just walk into any synagogue in religious Zionism—you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers and officers of all ranks there.”

He added that “the expectation that senior ministers will receive security information only from one pipeline is not only mistaken — it’s the perfect example of the ‘concept.”

The term is shorthand for the trap of allowing conceptual ideas about Hamas or other enemies to become accepted wisdom rather than being challenged, widely seen as a key failure that allowed the terror group to catch the country off guard on October 7, 2023.

Smotrich promised he “will continue to work in every way to learn, challenge, to hear, and to delve in — because this is the path to victory for Israel.”