The High Court of Justice is set to hear petitions on Wednesday seeking to force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to remove National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from his post, in a case that has sharpened into a test of how far a minister may go before political involvement in policing becomes unlawful interference in law enforcement itself.
The hearing will be held before an expanded nine-justice panel and, in an unusual procedural step, will be broadcast live while closed to the public because of concern over disruptions in the courtroom.
Ahead of the hearing, Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara and the petitioners put before the court parallel but mutually reinforcing pictures of Ben-Gvir’s tenure: not as a dispute over tone or ideology, but as what they say is a sustained pattern of improper intervention in investigations, promotions, protest policing, and other operational matters.
Netanyahu, by contrast, argued earlier this week that the petitions are an unconstitutional attempt to transfer control over the composition of the government from elected officials to legal gatekeepers and the court.
The attorney-general’s preliminary response argues that Netanyahu must be ordered to explain why he has not dismissed Ben-Gvir, saying the minister’s conduct has caused severe harm to the rule of law, equality in enforcement, and the apolitical character of the police. Her filing is built around a series of concrete episodes that she says show repeated intrusion into areas reserved for professional law-enforcement discretion.
The petitioners’ latest filing broadens that argument further and casts it in even starker terms. In their telling, the case is not only about improper interference with police independence, but about damage to Israel’s duty to maintain credible investigative mechanisms for soldiers and security personnel.
Their core claim is that Ben-Gvir has consistently pushed an unlawful agenda under which soldiers, police officers, and civilians who use force in operational settings should effectively be shielded from investigation, and that this risks undermining the “complementarity” principle that helps protect Israeli personnel from exposure to foreign or international prosecution.
They argue that Netanyahu has a duty to stop that process and that his failure to do so is itself an extreme and unreasonable administrative omission.
That filing does not rest on theory alone. Like the attorney-general’s response, it is built around a long series of episodes that the petitioners say reveal a recurring pattern: Ben-Gvir publicly denouncing investigations in real time, calling such intervention “backing” for police and soldiers, and, in practice, sending the message that professional law-enforcement bodies should back off.
The petitioners list repeated examples of Ben-Gvir attacking decisions by the Justice Ministry’s Police Investigation Department, military investigators, prosecutors, and courts immediately after probes or disciplinary steps were opened.
Among the cited instances are his remarks in cases involving a convicted police officer, a Special Patrol Unit commander, Border Police officers, soldiers under military review, as well as comments in late 2025 and early 2026 that, according to the petitioners, showed the same pattern continuing even after these proceedings were already underway.
One of the clearest anchors for the broader case remains the Rinat Saban affair because, unlike many other incidents, it has already produced a direct judicial finding. In February, the Jerusalem District Court ordered Ben-Gvir to promote Superintendent Rinat Saban, ruling that his refusal was unlawful, tainted by extraneous considerations, and harmful to police independence.
That ruling has since become one of the strongest pillars for those arguing that Ben-Gvir crossed the line from permissible ministerial oversight into unlawful political intervention in police personnel matters.
But the petitioners’ response also leans heavily on the summer 2024 events around Sde Teiman and Beit Lid, which it presents as the moment when the broader danger they had warned of was no longer abstract.
According to the filing, Ben-Gvir publicly attacked the military investigation into reservists suspected of abuse of a Palestinian detainee held at the facility, urged the military advocate general “take her hands off the reservists,” and continued to circulate those messages on social media.
The petitioners argue that those calls did not remain rhetorical; they say members of Ben-Gvir’s faction and hundreds of civilians then went to the bases in an effort to disrupt arrests and pressure military authorities, while police stood by. In their telling, that sequence demonstrated how ministerial incitement against lawful investigations could translate into real-world interference with enforcement.
Another major cluster of allegations concerns Ben-Gvir’s relationship with the police chain of command in 2024, while the High Court was still considering challenges to the 2022 Police Ordinance amendment associated with his appointment – a law that broadened the minister’s authority over police policy, but whose limits were still being tested in court.
The petitioners point to then-police chief Kobi Shabtai’s complaint that Ben-Gvir sought to impose a “policy” of not securing humanitarian aid convoys despite cabinet decisions and Netanyahu’s directives; to Ben-Gvir’s subsequent move to summon Shabtai to a hearing aimed at ending his tenure early; and to the attorney-general’s warning that the timing raised concern that a message was being sent down the police command structure “so they will see and fear.”
They further cite Shabtai’s later warning to the High Court that the amended legal framework was already destabilizing the principle of a professional, apolitical police force.
Petitioners preemptively reject public criticism defense
A notable feature of the petitioners’ filing is that it attempts to anticipate what will likely be one of Ben-Gvir’s main defenses at the hearing: that he was merely engaging in harsh but legitimate public criticism.
The petitioners reject that outright. They argue that this was not sporadic criticism of specific decisions, but a systematic campaign against the legitimacy of investigations themselves; that Ben-Gvir’s own statements show he viewed the remarks as expressing “policy,” not just opinion; and that the cumulative effect was to undermine public trust in the very institutions charged with enforcing the law.
They also say his repeated campaign against Baharav-Miara after she warned Netanyahu about his conduct cannot disqualify her from addressing the matter, since a public official cannot manufacture a conflict by attacking the legal authority tasked with overseeing him.
That means Wednesday’s hearing is likely to turn on more than the headline question of whether a sitting minister can be removed by judicial order. At the factual core will be whether the justices accept the attorney-general’s and petitioners’ cumulative reading of the cited episodes as a coherent pattern of unlawful interference.
At the legal core will be whether, if that pattern is made out, Netanyahu’s continued refusal to act becomes an independently reviewable failure to exercise his own authority lawfully.
Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir have framed the matter very differently, arguing that the petitions are an attempt to use the court to override political judgment and restructure the balance between ministers, the prime minister, and unelected legal officials.
But the filings now before the court suggest that the hearing will be less about abstract constitutional slogans than about the accumulation of specific incidents: who intervened, in what, how directly, and with what consequences for police independence and public confidence in law enforcement.