High Court voids the cabinet’s closure of Army Radio, and ministers promise to try again

The ruling came down on the afternoon of Thursday 20 August, eight months after Defence Minister Israel Katz announced in November 2025 that he intended to close the 75-year-old station and the cabinet approved the closure unanimously in late December, setting 1 March 2026 as the shut-off date. The court held that the decision must be overturned because it was taken “on the basis of an extraneous and improper consideration: the dissatisfaction of the decision-makers with the fact that the broadcasts, in their view, ran counter to their” positions. Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post and Arutz Sheva all carried the same ruling language independently; this is not a single-outlet reading of the text. The case had been frozen since 28 December, when Supreme Court President Isaac Amit issued an interim order noting the government “did not provide a clear commitment not to take irreversible steps,” a suspension Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara supported, and since a 2 February injunction requiring the state to justify itself in an affidavit by 15 March.

The Times of Israel’s live index logged the annulment at 19:22 IDT and, sixty-one minutes later at 20:23, the response: ministers fuming and vowing to keep trying to close the station. No minister was named in the index entry available to this desk, and the individual quotes have not been retrieved. The government’s stated case has not changed since Katz put it on the record in December, when he told Ynet the station “was created to serve soldiers and their families, not as a platform for opinions, many of which attack the IDF and its soldiers,” and summarised the decision in four words: “What was, will be no more.” Army Radio’s commander, Tal Lev-Ram, vowed the same week to fight the closure. He has now won a round with just over two months left before the 27 October election.

Assessment: Read the ruling narrowly, because the court did. It did not find that closing a military-run station is unlawful; it found that this government closed it for the wrong stated reason. That leaves an obvious route back — a fresh decision, differently argued, on budgetary or institutional grounds — and the ministers' immediate vow suggests they know it. What the judges have actually done is put ministerial motive on the record as a justiciable fact, which is the most inflammatory thing an Israeli court can do ten weeks before a vote in which judicial power is itself the argument. Expect the station to survive the term and the ruling to be campaigned against harder than the station is defended.