Shin Bet officer set to be charged over suspected leak of classified info

The Justice Ministry announced on Thursday that it plans to charge a Shin Bet officer with criminal wrongdoing over suspicions that he passed sensitive information to Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli and two journalists, which found its way into the press.

The Department for Internal Police Investigations in the ministry said in a statement that the officer, whose name is under gag order and is known by the Hebrew initial Aleph, was informed Thursday morning that he is facing indictment, pending a hearing at which he can make his case.

The officer, who was serving in the Shin Bet as a reservist, is accused of passing classified details of a Shin Bet investigation probing concerns that extremist Kahanist ideology was taking root in the police to Chikli, Channel 12 journalist Amit Segal, and Israel Hayom reporter Shirit Avitan Cohen.

He is also facing a charge of attempted transmission of classified information, after he sought to pass the information to additional journalists as well.

The Shin Bet investigation focused on concerns that extremist ideology was infiltrating into the police under the auspices of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, an acolyte of the late rabbi Meir Kahane, whose government role puts him in charge of the police.

Specifically, the probe reportedly focused on alleged intervention by Ben Gvir’s office in police instructions regarding Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount holy site in Jerusalem on the fast of Tisha B’Av in August 2024 when, in a departure from previous practice, officers refrained from detaining Jewish worshipers who prostrated themselves at the site.

The Shin Bet’s investigation began in September that year, according to the Channel 12 report, which also included what it said was a typed note by then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar dated September 26, 2024, in which he said that the agency had “marked the infiltration of Kahanism into the law enforcement agencies as a dangerous phenomenon whose prevention is part of the Shin Bet’s mission.”

Aleph’s attorney has said his client believed it was in the public’s interest to know the information he is accused of leaking, and that the leak did not endanger state security.

The leak of the investigation in late March this year further stoked tensions between the Shin Bet and the government, which were already strained due to the government’s decision earlier that month to fire Bar.

Aleph was detained in April on suspicion of leaking the information. Although a gag order was initially placed on the details of the affair, Likud MKs Tally Gotliv and Avihai Boaron posted partial information about it on social media, prompting the judge overseeing the case to partially lift the injunction while keeping in place the prohibition reporting the name of the official.

Channel 12 journalist Segal criticized Bar and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara at the time, saying his report on the investigation had embarrassed them and led them to pursue his source.

Writing on X at the time, Segal said that after the probes into the police didn’t reveal anything, Bar and Baharav-Miara decided to “to hunt the person who exposed them, and so they threw him into custody without a lawyer.”

The Shin Bet characterized the affair as a “a grave and irregular matter,” however, and accused the Shin Bet official of “abusing his security role and his direct access to the Shin Bet’s information systems in order to take classified material and transfer it to unauthorized people, several times and in a suspicious manner… in a way that endangers security” and “in violation of the law.”