Security providers have opened an investigation into the theft of navy paperwork from the car of a candidate for the position of navy attache to the prime minister, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported Sunday.
On Thursday, Col. Avi Bluth, at present head of the elite commando brigade, parked his car in a parking zone for the period of an officers’ tour of the West Bank.
He took his weapon and safe communications gadget with him however left the papers, reportedly with a low stage of classification, in the car. It is forbidden beneath military laws to depart categorized paperwork in an unsupervised car.
The theft occurred the day earlier than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned Bluth for a shock interview for the job of prime minister’s navy attache.
Netanyahu has already interviewed a number of candidates to interchange the present occupant of the job, Brig. Gen. Eliezer Toledano, who is because of take over as chief of the Gaza Brigade.
Col. Eliezer Toledano speaks with paratroopers on July 24, 2013. (Gal Ashuach/IDF spokesperson/FLASH90)
Investigators from the navy police and the Shin Bet intelligence service will likely be wanting carefully on the stage of classification given to the paperwork that had been stolen, in addition to whether or not Bluth adopted process in the aftermath of the incident.
That will assist decide not solely Bluth’s possibilities of getting the navy attache’s job, but additionally his future in the military.
Thursday’s incident was the most recent in a string of thefts of paperwork taken from the automobiles and houses of senior military officers in latest years.
The former Manpower Directorate’s head, Maj. Gen. Hagai Topolanski, resigned from the military in December 2016 after a laptop computer containing categorized data was stolen from his residence.
The yr earlier than, Col. Ilan Levy was summarily dismissed from his place after categorized paperwork had been stolen from his car, the place he had unintentionally left them. The paperwork had been later positioned.
Maj. Gen. Hagai Topolanski, head of the IDF Manpower Directorate, speaks at an Israeli Democracy Institute convention on November 29, 2016. (Courtesy Israeli Democracy Institute)
Bluth’s interview with Netanyahu got here as a shock as a result of he isn't on the chief of workers’s listing of really useful candidates and is simply eight months into his job as commander of the 89th Brigade, often known as the Oz Brigade or the “commando brigade,” which undertakes particular operations and consists of the elite Maglan, Duvdevan and Egoz items.
Before taking over his present appointment, Bluth commanded the parachute regiment and was injured throughout Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-2009 Gaza conflict.
He went on to command Maglan and the Hebron Brigade.
Bluth, from an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, is a graduate of the controversial Mechinat Bnei David pre-military academy in the West Bank’s settlement of Eli.
Eli pre-army academy heads Rabbi Eli Sadan (L) and Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, July 1, 2015. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
Bnei David has supplied the military with 1000's of religiously observant officers.
In July 2016, a co-founder of the academy, Yigal Levinstein, was recorded calling LGBT individuals “deviant.” Less than eight months later, Levinstein discovered himself again in nationwide tabloids for telling new IDF recruits that navy service drives feminine troopers “crazy” and strips them of their Jewishness. And in February of this yr, footage resurfaced of an academy trainer, Yosef Kelner, telling college students in a lecture that girls had been “weak-minded” and possessed a lowered capability for spirituality.
Another graduate of Bnei David who rose up the military’s ranks, Ofer Winter, was handed over for promotion but once more final week.
Then-Givati Brigade commander Col. Ofer Winter, heart, August 2, 2014. (Israel Defense Forces)
Winter got here beneath criticism throughout 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, when he served as commander of the Givati Brigade, for a letter to his subordinate officers in which he described the operation as a non secular conflict in opposition to a “blasphemous” foe
In media interviews, Winter additionally described his troops as being protected in battle by “clouds of glory,” elevating issues amongst non secular freedom activists that Winter was theocratizing the navy.