They suffered a severe blow: The Supreme Court today (Thursday) ordered the petitioners against the appointment of Shin Bet chief David Zini to provide him with a complete list of their names within a week.
The decision was made after Zini insisted on his demand to receive the list.
The decision, signed by Justices Yitzhak Amit, Noam Solberg and David Mintz, states: "Since Respondent 4 maintains his right to receive the list, and without determining whether the decisions issued so far obliged the petitioners to reveal their names to Respondent 4, we order that the petitioners do so within a week from today.".
The decision comes after Zini filed a contempt of court motion against the petitioners, including former Shin Bet chiefs Nadav Argaman, Ami Ayalon, and Carmi Gillon, along with 186 former employees and managers in the service.
Zini claimed that the petitioners are not complying with the ruling and are refusing to hand over their names to him.
In the December 2025 ruling, the Supreme Court already ruled that the petitioners had not pointed to a legal source that would allow them to hide their identities from Zini. "A petition to this court is not a petition that can be signed anonymously and in which serious allegations can be made against others, without bearing the consequences.".
The court ruled in the same ruling that there is no reason to leave the publication restriction on the list in relation to Zini himself, even though the names remain prohibited from being published to the public.
Solberg then suggested to Zini that he consider, as a precaution, giving up accepting the list, but Zini insisted on his right to accept it.
It later emerged that the list in the court secretariat contained the names of many of the petitioners in initials only. The petitioners argued, however, that the previous ruling did not include an operative order requiring them to hand over the names to Zini, a claim that the court refrained from ruling on in its decision today.
Instead of deciding the dispute over the meaning of the previous decisions, the judges now gave an explicit order: the petitioners are required to give Zini their names within a week.
