The government has until January 4 to explain why it won’t establish a State commission of inquiry (COI) into the failures of October 7, the High Court of Justice announced on Wednesday evening.
The conditional order issued by the court asks that the government address the issues raised by the petitioners in the case.
Earlier this week, the government announced it would establish a commission of inquiry but explicitly stopped short of creating a full state COI. The decision empowers the prime minister to set up a ministerial committee that will determine the panel’s mandate and appoint its members, effectively ensuring that the body probing the disaster is selected by the same political echelon whose conduct may be under scrutiny.
For bereaved families and families of hostages, the move immediately raised red flags: the inquiry would exist, but without the independence, subpoena powers, and judicial appointment process that define a true state commission.
That decision came less than a month after a key parliamentary showdown. On October 22, the coalition used its majority to block a proposal to establish a state commission of inquiry into the October 7. The move was widely interpreted as a deliberate effort to prevent an inquiry chaired by a retired Supreme Court justice and appointed by the Supreme Court president, as the law requires for a formal state commission.
Lack of coherent national security coordination
The State Comptroller’s Office, for its part, has conducted and published its own audits over the past year, warning of a chronic lack of coherent national security doctrine and coordination at the highest levels, and signaling that without a truly independent, state-level commission, the lessons of October 7 may never be fully learned.
These developments sit atop two years of mounting pressure for a state COI. Since the first weeks after October 7, when Hamas-led terrorists killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and abducted 250 to Gaza, there has been a broad expectation that the country would eventually convene a body on the scale of the Agranat Commission, which probed the failures of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
But as the war in Gaza dragged on and internal political tensions escalated, the government repeatedly argued that “now is not the time” for a full inquiry. By late 2024 and into 2025, the question of a commission had become a symbol of something larger.
Keshet Neev contributed to this report.