A new High Court petition filed on Sunday seeks to block IDF Maj.-Gen. Roman Gofman’s appointment as the next head of the Mossad, arguing that serious flaws in both the vetting process and the underlying conduct attributed to him in the Ori Elmakayes affair should have disqualified him from one of Israel’s most sensitive security posts.
The petition was filed by the Movement for Quality Government in Israel and Forum Homat Magen LeIsrael against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the government, the Senior Appointments Advisory Committee, Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, and Gofman himself.
It asks the court to issue a conditional order requiring Netanyahu to explain why he should not rescind the appointment; an interim order; or temporary injunction freezing the appointment while the case is heard; and, alternatively, an order requiring the advisory committee to reconsider the nomination from scratch.
The filing also asks the court to review, for its eyes only, the full body of materials that stood before the committee, including the classified materials submitted to it and the full secret opinion written by former Supreme Court president Asher Grunis, who issued the lone dissent against Gofman’s approval.
The petition further requests that the case be joined to another petition already pending over the same appointment, for which an urgent hearing has already been set for May 5.
The Elmakayes affair centers the petition
At the center of the new petition is the Elmakayes affair, which has shadowed Gofman’s candidacy from the outset and emerged as the sharpest point of division inside the advisory committee itself. The broader, already publicly reported outline of this episode is that Elmakayes was a minor when he was used in an unauthorized IDF-linked influence operation connected to the 210th Bashan Division while Gofman commanded it, and that he was later detained for an extended period before the case against him collapsed.
The petition goes further, alleging that Gofman approved using Elmakayes despite lacking authority to do so under military law, that the operation led to the transfer of classified materials to a minor, and that Elmakayes was then left to face prolonged detention, harsh interrogation conditions, and an indictment that was ultimately withdrawn. Those are the petitioners’ allegations, but they are central to the legal challenge now before the court.
The filing leans heavily on Grunis’s minority view inside the advisory committee. According to the petition, Grunis concluded that significant flaws had arisen in Gofman’s integrity, questioned the credibility of his version of events, and cast doubt on claims that Gofman did not know a minor was being operated by the division or that he did not know of the arrest in real time.
The committee process that cleared Gofman
The petition says that, in Grunis’s view, Gofman approved the operation without authority and bore command responsibility for what followed.
A central aspect of the new petition is not only what it says about Gofman, but also what it says about the committee process that cleared him anyway.
It argues that two of the three committee members in the majority were not exposed to all of the relevant classified material, that they signed onto their position before Grunis had completed his full written opinion, and that the committee refused repeated requests by Elmakayes himself to testify before it, relying instead on two media interviews he had given.
According to the petitioners, this left the committee ruling on one of the appointment’s most serious factual disputes without hearing directly from the person at the center of it. The filing also folds in a broader argument about the appointing authority.
It says the committee failed to give proper weight to prior findings concerning Netanyahu himself, including the committee’s earlier determination in another context that there were cases in which he asked security chiefs to carry out actions “not appropriate in a democratic regime” and the submarines commission’s severe warning notice language regarding damage to state security, foreign relations, and economic interests.
On that basis, the petition argues that the committee should have applied heightened scrutiny to the appointment rather than a lighter one.
It further argues that Gofman lacks the professional background ordinarily expected for the post, saying he has never held an intelligence or covert-operations role; points to prior published criticism over his English proficiency; as well as to concerns that the choice reflected Netanyahu’s personal trust in his military secretary more than institutional suitability for the job.
Those broader criticisms have long surrounded the nomination, though earlier reporting suggested the legal fight itself would rise or fall primarily on the Elmakayes affair rather than on the outsider issue alone.
Netanyahu formally approved Gofman’s appointment on April 12 – last week – after the advisory committee cleared him despite Grunis’s dissent. Gofman, currently Netanyahu’s military secretary, is set to replace outgoing Mossad chief David Barnea on June 2.
The new petition, in effect, asks the High Court to decide that this was not merely a controversial appointment but an unlawful and unreasonable one: a nomination to one of Israel’s most secretive and consequential posts that, the petitioners say, should never have survived the vetting stage in the first place.
Yonah Jeremy Bob contributed to this report.