Israel Police officer Rinat Saban on Tuesday asked the Jerusalem District Court to hold National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in contempt, accusing him of knowingly refusing to carry out a February ruling ordering her promotion to chief superintendent without delay.
In the urgent motion, Saban and her co-petitioners asked the court to compel Ben-Gvir to sign the appointment papers within three days and, if he still does not comply, to deem the promotion effective retroactively from April 28, 2025, and have it carried out by Police Commissioner Daniel Levi.
The filing says the court had already ruled on February 9 that Ben-Gvir must approve Saban’s promotion “without delay,” and then, on February 23, rejected his request to stay that judgment pending appeal. Despite that, the motion argues, the minister still has not signed off on the rank change and has instead acted as though the ruling was frozen, even though the court never granted that.
At the heart of the dispute is a case that has become one of the clearest judicial flashpoints over Ben-Gvir’s authority over the police. Saban, a veteran officer in the Investigations and Intelligence Division, finished the required command course on April 28, 2025, the point at which she was supposed to receive the promotion alongside her peers.
According to the contempt motion and the February ruling itself, Ben-Gvir had already approved her appointment in late 2024, and all relevant professional bodies later backed advancing her rank. Yet after she completed the course, her promotion alone was frozen.
Ben-Gvir’s refusal to promote Saban was judged as 'unlawful'
The court’s February judgment was unusually sharp. Judge David Gidoni held that Ben-Gvir’s refusal to promote Saban was unlawful, tainted by extraneous considerations and harmful to police independence. The ruling said the minister’s conduct reflected “extreme unreasonableness,” stood in stark contradiction to the position of the commissioner and other professional authorities, and raised a real concern that improper considerations tied to Saban’s involvement in investigations concerning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers had driven the delay.
That background is central to the contempt motion as well. The filing says Ben-Gvir began raising objections only after repeated inquiries from senior police officials and legal authorities, and that those objections focused on Saban’s role as a junior officer in investigations involving Netanyahu’s circle, as well as testimony she later gave in Case 4000.
The motion says professional police and legal officials answered those claims in full, stressing that she had never faced disciplinary or command sanctions and that similar arguments had not been raised against other officers in comparable promotion proceedings.
The petitioners argue that the public stakes go beyond Saban’s personal advancement. Echoing the February ruling, they say continued refusal to implement the judgment risks chilling officers and investigators, especially those dealing with politically sensitive corruption cases. The motion repeatedly frames the issue as one of police independence and rule of law, arguing that a minister cannot decide for himself when a court order will take effect.
According to the motion, Saban’s lawyers wrote to Ben-Gvir on February 23 and again on February 26, demanding immediate compliance after the stay request was denied. They say no substantive response came until March 1, when the minister’s lawyer said he was preparing both an appeal on the merits and a request for leave to appeal the denial of a stay, and that Saban should wait for the procedural timelines set by law.
When the petitioners answered that the operative deadline was the court’s own order to act “without delay,” Ben-Gvir’s side replied that because the court had not granted the attorney-general’s request for a more sweeping remedy that would have bypassed his signature altogether, his procedural rights remained intact. The motion presents those exchanges as proof that the delay is conscious and deliberate rather than accidental.
The filing also points to Ben-Gvir’s public rhetoric after the February ruling. It says that, even after judgment was entered against him, the minister wrote on Facebook that Saban should not only be denied promotion but fired. The petitioners cite that, too, as part of what they describe as a continuing campaign of retaliation rather than an ordinary administrative dispute.
The broader case has unfolded against growing concern over Ben-Gvir’s attempts to shape police appointments and investigations. Saban’s case sits within a wider institutional clash over political pressure on the police, and the attorney-general had already cited her case as an example of potentially unlawful interference.
Ben-Gvir had also blocked the promotion of another investigations officer, Ruti Hauslich, prompting renewed allegations from the attorney-general that he was acting on foreign and political considerations contrary to the commissioner’s position.