A year and a half after classified information was leaked to journalists and Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Police Internal Investigations Department announced Thursday that it intends to indict A., a reserve Shin Bet officer, pending a hearing, for passing secret information in violation of the law.
Following the revelations, the Shin Bet said that “an agency employee was suspected of exploiting his security position and direct access to Shin Bet information systems to obtain classified material and transfer it to unauthorized parties, on multiple occasions and in secret. Given the serious suspicion that classified information was being removed by an employee in a way that endangered national security, an internal investigation was launched into his actions.”
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Minister Amichai Chikli attends a hearing on extending the suspect’s detention, April
(Photo: Yair Sagi)
After the case surfaced, Chikli appealed to the state comptroller to recognize A. as a whistleblower. Members of Chikli’s Likud party rushed to defend the reservist and attacked then–Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. “A Shin Bet officer who felt that under Ronen Bar the agency became a political body was arrested and interrogated in the Shin Bet’s basements,” the Likud said following the investigation’s disclosure. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not comment directly but retweeted the party’s statement.
The Justice Ministry said A., who served as deputy head of a Shin Bet unit, is suspected of illegally transferring classified information whose confidentiality is vital to national security. According to investigators, in 2024 he gave such information to journalists Amit Segal and Shirit Avitan Cohen and to Chikli, and it was later published in the media. He allegedly also contacted other journalists in an attempt to leak additional material.
Investigators say the acts attributed to him caused intelligence damage and harmed state security. The suspect did not give the information directly to the journalists but through an intermediary, who was a public figure. He reportedly leaked information to Segal on multiple occasions and also considered giving documents to the wife of a protest activist the Shin Bet was monitoring, but changed his mind and destroyed the material.
The leaked files reportedly included internal Shin Bet documents showing the agency had examined suspicions of “Kahanist infiltration” into the police, and another outlining its position on events preceding the October 7 attacks, which A. believed contradicted the official Shin Bet report on the massacre.