Ben-Gvir and Feiglin seize on ex-police officer Avishai Moalem's TV claims

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Moshe Feiglin, two figures on the Israeli right, have each posted on X about an appearance by Avishai Moalem, a retired senior police officer, on the television programme "HaPatriotim" (The Patriots). Both describe Moalem as having made serious allegations about how investigations were built, and both call for action. The only material available to us consists of these two posts, so everything below is what the two politicians said, not established fact.

Ben-Gvir wrote on X that Moalem had said in his own voice that a case was fabricated against him for the sole purpose of bringing down Ben-Gvir. Feiglin wrote on X the following morning that he had sent an urgent letter to the head of the Shin Bet, David Zini, and had asked to meet him, citing what he called Moalem's testimony about forged material and invented evidence used against settlers.

What Ben-Gvir said

In his post, Ben-Gvir described Moalem as a decorated and respected officer who had given his best years to the state. He wrote that the disclosures should shake every citizen of Israel, on the left as well as the right, and he likened the methods Moalem described to those of a mafia. He called for what he termed a dark system to be exposed, investigated and eliminated, and said the matter must not be allowed to pass without attention. His post does not identify who allegedly built the case against Moalem, when, or what the case concerned.

What Feiglin said

Feiglin's post goes further in its characterisation. He wrote that Moalem had described not an isolated failure but a pattern: forging the paraphrases of intelligence material, stitching together cases and inventing evidence in order to place settlers in administrative detention, in some instances, he said, people who were abroad at the time of the incident in question. Feiglin added that, having followed the subject for years, he had no doubt that the Shin Bet's Jewish Division had become an ideologically driven apparatus of persecution that operates in secret, blocks access to lawyers and tramples basic civil rights. The text of his post as available to us is cut off after his request for a meeting with Zini, so its full contents are not known.

The institutions and terms involved

The Shin Bet, formally the Israel Security Agency, is Israel's domestic security service, responsible for counter-terrorism and internal intelligence. Its Jewish Division is the unit that deals with suspected violence and subversion by Jewish Israelis, including extremist activity among settlers in the West Bank. The unit has long been criticised by parts of the Israeli right, which accuses it of heavy-handed methods.

Administrative detention is a measure that allows the state to hold a person without charge or trial on security grounds, usually on the basis of classified intelligence that the detainee and their lawyer cannot fully see. A paraphrase, in this context, is the unclassified summary of that secret evidence which is shown to the detainee and the court. Feiglin's allegation is that these summaries were falsified.

Moalem's rank, given by both politicians, is Nitzav Mishne, a senior grade in the Israel Police roughly equivalent to commander.

What the reports do not say

We have not seen Moalem's own words: the only accounts of his testimony come from two politicians with a stake in the subject, and no news organisation's report of the programme was available. Neither post mentions elections, despite this event being framed elsewhere as concerning election forgery, and it is unclear whether Moalem made any such claim. Ben-Gvir does not say what case was allegedly fabricated against Moalem. No response from the Shin Bet, the Israel Police or David Zini to the allegations or to Feiglin's letter has been reported, and no evidence supporting the claims has been made public.