The Jerusalem District Court on Thursday gave National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir 10 days to notify the court of his position in the petition by senior police officer Ruti Hauslich, whose promotion he has blocked, in a decision that sharpened the parallel to the earlier Rinat Saban case and placed renewed focus on the minister’s conduct in senior police appointments.
The court ordered Ben-Gvir to submit his position by April 26, with the file set for review the following day.
The order did not itself direct Hauslich’s immediate promotion, but the hearing made clear that the case cannot be viewed in a vacuum. It came just one day after Ben-Gvir’s legal representatives spent hours before the High Court of Justice defending against petitions, backed by the attorney-general, seeking his removal from office over what were described there as repeated improper interventions in policing, including appointments and promotions.
Hauslich, a senior officer in the police Investigations and Intelligence Division, was recommended by the police command for promotion to head of the Investigations Department, but Ben-Gvir refused to approve the move, citing what he called grave misconduct in her conduct before Knesset committees.
The attorney-general’s office has argued that his refusal appeared to rest on extraneous considerations and warned that such conduct risked turning promotions into a tool of political pressure inside the police.
At Thursday’s hearing, Hauslich’s lawyer explicitly tied the matter to the Saban affair, arguing that, as in that case, Ben-Gvir was trying after the fact to derail a professionally approved promotion in the investigations branch on grounds that did not meet the legal threshold for overriding the recommendation of the police command.
The protocol shows that he argued that the minister had remained silent for months despite knowing the relevant facts and raised his objections only later, after intervention by the attorney-general’s deputies.
The police and the state largely backed that position. Their representative argued in court that Ben-Gvir’s decision ignored Hauslich’s qualifications, disregarded the senior command’s recommendation, and sent a troubling message that promotion in sensitive police units depends not on professional, apolitical service under the chain of command, but on conformity with the minister’s expectations. She also stressed that Hauslich had acted under instructions from her superiors and was never the subject of disciplinary or criminal proceedings.
Judge Tamar Bar-Asher appeared skeptical of the minister’s reasoning, saying the grounds advanced by Ben-Gvir were not clear and described Hauslich as having been turned into a “scapegoat.”
Ben-Gvir's side insisted the case was not about a legitimate internal policy disagreement within the police, but about what his representative, David Peter, described as knowingly false factual presentations to Knesset lawmakers carrying out parliamentary oversight of the executive branch.
Peter argued that the minister was not stepping into a routine clash over professional positions, but reacting to what he cast as a much more serious matter: repeated instances in which Hauslich allegedly gave lawmakers inaccurate information about enforcement gaps, internal disagreements, and her own contacts with relevant police officials. Those alleged misrepresentations, he said, were serious enough to warrant renewed examination by the senior command before her promotion could proceed.
He further argued that Ben-Gvir had been boxed in by the fallout from the Rinat Saban ruling, which treated prolonged inaction as the functional equivalent of a refusal to appoint. In Peter’s telling, that left the minister caught between two risks: if he delayed further while trying to send the matter back for reconsideration, he risked being told he had effectively refused the appointment; but if he issued a formal refusal, he would immediately face judicial review on the merits.
On that basis, Peter framed Ben-Gvir’s request for more time and renewed consideration not as stalling, but as a practical effort to break what he portrayed as a legal and procedural deadlock.
Ben-Gvir acted unlawfully in blocking promotion, court rules
That is precisely why the Saban precedent hangs so heavily over the case. In February, the Jerusalem District Court ruled that Ben-Gvir had acted unlawfully in blocking the promotion of Superintendent Rinat Saban, finding his refusal suffered from extreme unreasonableness and raised real concerns of extraneous considerations.
A later clarification stated that if he still did not sign by the deadline set, the promotion would take effect by force of the judicial ruling itself. Saban was ultimately promoted despite his continued opposition.
Hauslich’s lawyers pressed that comparison directly on Thursday, telling the court that the same structure was repeating itself: a promotion endorsed by the police brass, a delayed refusal by the minister, and an effort to revisit the professional recommendation only after legal pressure mounted.
The hearing protocol shows they also emphasized the long gap between the events Ben-Gvir attributes to Hauslich and the July 2025 recommendation to promote her, arguing that no one in the system treated the issue as disqualifying in real time.
The overlap with the High Court hearing the previous day only reinforced the larger significance of the case. In that proceeding, the attorney-general’s office cited the Saban and Hauslich matters among the examples it says show improper political involvement by Ben-Gvir in police operations and personnel decisions.
That makes Hauslich’s case more than a dispute about one promotion: it has become part of the evidentiary record in the broader fight over whether the minister crossed the line from lawful policy-setting into impermissible interference in police independence.
Later Thursday, Ben-Gvir addressed the controversy publicly at an Independence Day ceremony for the Israel Police, where he referred back to the High Court hearing and mocked what he said were claims against him that he automatically backs police officers and gives support to those who shoot at attackers.
He said those accusations only moved him and cast him as the kind of minister who embraces, protects, and supports police. He also said he does not encourage unlawful force, while insisting that police must feel fully backed in confronting terrorists.
For now, the practical consequence is limited but important: Ben-Gvir has until April 26 to file a written position. If his response fails to satisfy the court, Hauslich’s case could move closer to the same operative logic that ultimately governed Saban’s: judicial intervention to prevent an indefinite political standoff over promotions in the police investigations branch.