The Beersheba District Court on Wednesday acquitted the defendant in the “fake officer” affair, Assaf Shmuelevitz, finding that while he carried out the acts described in the indictment, he was not criminally responsible due to mental illness and being in a psychotic state at the time.
In a ruling made public on Wednesday, the three-judge panel – headed by Judge Gilat Shalev and joined by judges Itay Bresler-Gonen and Fani Gilat Cohen – said that the psychiatric evidence, accepted by both sides, established that Shmuelevitz’s mental condition had deprived him of the ability to understand either what he was doing or the wrongfulness of his actions. On that basis, the court held that the insanity defense applied and ordered his acquittal.
The decision closes the criminal phase of one of the more unusual wartime security cases to emerge in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Shmuelevitz, a former IDF lieutenant released from regular service, decided, on the morning of October 7, to “draft himself” into reserve duty despite never receiving a call-up order.
In the days that followed, prosecutors said, he presented himself falsely as an intelligence officer and later as a captain attached to a special unit, exploiting the chaos and pressure of the war’s opening days to gain access to highly classified information at Southern Command and other sensitive military sites.
The court said that through a series of false representations, he managed to enter command centers and operations rooms, attend assessments he was not authorized to join, photograph soldiers and computer screens, record conversations involving secret and top-secret material, and share certain classified information with unauthorized civilians and former military personnel.
The judges stressed that he had been charged under the least severe variant of the serious espionage offense and that there was no allegation of intent to harm state security or pass information to hostile or foreign actors. Rather, the secret information was shared with people unauthorized to receive it, one of whom ultimately reported him, leading to his arrest.
Over time, courts gradually loosened a sweeping gag order that had initially barred publication of almost all the case’s details.
The defendant's case was shifted due to his psychiatric record
What shifted the case was not the factual core of conduct but the psychiatric record.
The court said Shmuelevitz was sent for psychiatric examination in the early stages of the proceedings, and that in two opinions issued on December 5, 2023, and February 25, 2024, he was already found to have been unfit in terms of criminal responsibility at the time of the offenses, though still fit to stand trial.
At the prosecution’s request, he later underwent broader examination under hospitalization conditions, and a multidisciplinary expert panel reached the same conclusion in a more comprehensive opinion submitted in November 2024.
According to the court’s summary, those evaluations found Shmuelevitz to have been in a psychotic state accompanied by grandiose delusions, including beliefs that he could establish a parallel military framework to assist the IDF, defeat Hamas, rescue the hostages, and save the state. The experts also found signs of earlier psychotic episodes in the two years before his arrest, during which he reportedly took on what the ruling described as “life missions” on a global scale related to the war in Ukraine and the earthquake in Turkey.
Although the prosecution ultimately accepted the psychiatric conclusions, the case did not end immediately because Shmuelevitz had originally denied the charges, and the trial had proceeded.
The evidentiary phase began in January 2025, and the prosecution concluded its case in late January 2026.
Then, after a change in legal representation, the defense informed the court on February 17 that the defendant wished to change his response to the indictment and accept responsibility for the acts attributed to him. The judges said that, after listening to him in two hearings, they were satisfied that he had in fact committed the acts with which he was charged.
In a statement issued after the ruling, the prosecution said that at the end of the prosecutorial evidence, Shmuelevitz admitted to all the acts attributed to him, and the court accepted that admission, but nonetheless determined that he had not been responsible for his actions at the time because he was mentally ill and in a psychotic state.
The prosecution added that under the law, such a finding requires the issuance of a psychiatric hospitalization order. It also revealed that it had asked the court to set the maximum possible hospitalization period for these offenses at 15 years.
For now, the court has ordered that Shmuelevitz be hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in accordance with the district psychiatrist’s decision, pending a further hearing on the terms of the hospitalization order, set for March 29.