A High Court of Justice petition filed on Sunday seeks to block Maj.-Gen. Roman Gofman’s appointment as Mossad chief, arguing that his conduct in the Ori Elmakayes affair should have disqualified him from leading Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.
The petition was filed just after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved Gofman’s appointment, after he cleared the Senior Appointments Advisory Committee and ahead of his scheduled June 2 entry into office.
Filed by Elmakayes together with the Movement for Integrity in Government, the petition names Netanyahu, the advisory committee, Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, and Gofman himself as respondents.
It asks the court to explain why Gofman’s appointment should not be canceled and why the committee’s approval should not be revisited.
Supreme Court Justice Yael Willner announced on Tuesday that a hearing will be scheduled at the earliest possible date and that she did not see a reason “at this point” to issue an interim order freezing proceedings.
She also gave respondents until a week before the hearing to submit preliminary responses.
At the center of the petition is the Elmakayes affair, the same episode that produced the sole dissent within the advisory committee and became the sharpest fault line in the fight over Gofman’s fitness for the job.
The broader factual core of the affair is that Elmakayes was a minor when he was used in an unauthorized IDF-linked influence operation while Gofman commanded the 210th “Bashan” Division, and that he was later detained for a lengthy period before the case against him collapsed and the charges were dropped.
Multiple reports further said he was used in an Arabic-language online influence effort tied to Gofman’s command.
The petition argues that the affair was not a marginal lapse but rather a direct test of Gofman’s judgment, integrity, and reliability in command. It alleges that he authorized or oversaw the use of a minor in that operation, then failed to take responsibility once Elmakayes was arrested and the affair had unraveled.
It also alleges that Gofman gave investigators an account that could not be squared with the underlying facts. Those assertions remain the petitioners’ claims, but they form the core of the legal case now before the court.
The filing leans heavily on Elmakayes’s own account of how he became involved. According to the petition, he was drawn in as a teenager after building a large Telegram-based following around security-related developments.
The petition says his activity eventually included operating fictitious Arabic-language accounts and entering closed online spaces in order to gather information.
Those operational details are best attributed to the petition and to Elmakayes’s version of events, rather than stated as an uncontested fact.
That distinction matters because the narrower, independently corroborated outline is already serious enough: a minor was used in an unauthorized influence operation connected to Gofman’s division, and the same minor then spent well over a year in detention before the case collapsed.
The charges were dropped after it emerged that the information Elmakayes had published had been supplied to him by intelligence officers; the affair returned to the foreground when Gofman’s nomination came up for review.
Lone Gofman dissenter points to operation of minor
The Elmakayes case also split the vetting committee itself.
While the committee ultimately approved Gofman’s appointment, former Supreme Court president Asher Grunis issued the lone dissent, writing that it was not appropriate to appoint Gofman to head the Mossad.
Grunis specifically pointed to the operation of the minor, saying he doubted Gofman had not known the unit was using a teenager.
That split sits near the center of the petition. Still, the committee majority cleared the appointment, and Netanyahu signed off on it shortly afterward. Gofman, 49, is due to replace outgoing Mossad chief David Barnea in June after first being nominated in December.
Most of the broader criticism of Gofman’s nomination has focused on his lack of prior Mossad experience. But that argument has not been the center of the legal challenge.
The petition instead fixates on the Elmakayes affair, arguing that this is the episode that should have barred the nomination altogether.
Elmakayes gave his version of events in a series of televised interviews that began in early 2025.
Yonah Jeremy Bob contributed to this report.