The State Attorney’s Office filed an urgent appeal to the High Court of Justice on Wednesday against the release to house arrest of four defendants in the wartime Gaza smuggling case, including Bezalel Zini, brother of Shin Bet chief David Zini, after the Beersheba District Court ruled on Tuesday that the evidentiary record did not support the prosecution’s most serious wartime-security counts at the detention stage. The appeal was heard Wednesday at 5 p.m. before Justice Gila Canfy-Steinitz.
The appeal targets two decisions by Beersheba District Court Judge Alon Gabizon, in which he first held that the evidence, as presented for detention purposes, did not establish the offenses of aiding the enemy in wartime and prohibited dealings in terror property, and then ordered the release of four defendants under strict house-arrest conditions instead of keeping them jailed pending trial.
In Tuesday’s ruling, Gabizon wrote in Zini’s case that although a detention ground still existed in principle, it could be neutralized through full house arrest, supervision and added restrictions.
Under the release framework, Zini was to be held under full house arrest in Ofra, with approved supervisors, a NIS 30,000 cash deposit, a NIS 50,000 personal undertaking, third-party guarantees, surrender of his passport and a stay-of-exit order. Comparable conditions were imposed on the other three defendants whose release is now under appeal.
In the appeal, the state argues that the district court went too far, too early. Prosecutors contend that Gabizon effectively made factual and legal determinations on the core wartime-security charges at a detention stage, before the full criminal case had been heard, and that he improperly replaced the statutory detention analysis with what the state portrays as an almost final merits ruling.
At Wednesday’s hearing, state representative Sigal Blum argued that the district court had effectively substituted its own assessment for the indictment and the investigative material, and urged the High Court to restore detention, warning that the lower court had reached factual conclusions prematurely.
The state argues detention justified
The state also argued that the remaining charges and the broader wartime context still justified detention even aside from the gravest counts. Balus stressed before Canfy-Steinitz that the alleged conduct took place during wartime, involved repeated goods transfers into Gaza, and generated large sums of money, arguing that the scale of the case and the security context supported continued custody.
Tuesday’s district court ruling was a major setback for that position. Gabizon drew a line between serious alleged wartime misconduct and the much heavier security offenses the prosecution had chosen to charge, concluding that once the evidentiary basis for those top counts fell away at the detention stage, continued incarceration was no longer automatic.
He further found in Zini’s case that the risk of similar conduct had “diminished to the point of nonexistence,” partly because the alleged acts were committed in the context of reserve duty and he is no longer serving in that same framework.
The hearing before Canfy-Steinitz centered largely on the narrower detention question: whether the danger allegedly posed by the defendants could be neutralized by strict alternatives to custody. Defense lawyers argued that the district court had not dismissed the allegations, but had distinguished between the indictment’s most severe wartime-security framing and the evidentiary basis currently before the court at this stage.
The indictment alleges that Zini exploited his reserve position to help smuggle cigarette cartons into Gaza in exchange for hundreds of thousands of shekels, with prosecutors framing the scheme as one that financially benefited Hamas and therefore amounted not just to corruption and smuggling, but to aiding the enemy in wartime.
Defense counsel pushed back on that framing during Wednesday’s hearing. Representing one of the defendants, lawyer Avner Shemesh, argued that the district court had already found no evidentiary basis at this stage for the core security offenses and said the remaining concerns could be addressed through robust supervision and full house arrest. Lawyers for the other defendants similarly argued that the state was seeking to preserve detention despite the lower court’s finding that the evidentiary basis for the gravest counts was lacking at this stage.
Canfy-Steinitz pressed both sides on the practical detention issue, including the nature of the alleged danger, the adequacy of the proposed supervisors, and whether some of the prosecution’s arguments went beyond the indictment itself.
As the case now stands, the issue before the High Court is not only how the indictment is framed, but whether the district court was entitled, on the record before it, to conclude that the alleged danger could be managed through restrictive alternatives rather than continued detention pending trial.