Smotrich urges the army to defy the High Court over Jenin’s displaced

Ruling on a petition by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the High Court of Justice on 12 October ordered the state to state by 23 November whether it can expedite the return of more than 33,000 Palestinians displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur al-Shams refugee camps, Haaretz reported. The camps have stood empty since the IDF’s major counter-terror operation there in 2025. The Times of Israel’s liveblog, at 19:11, rendered Defence Minister Israel Katz as describing the military presence in the depopulated camps as permanent and saying it was not the High Court’s business to intervene in operational military activity — a paraphrase, not a verbatim Hebrew sentence. The Media Line then reported that Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister and also a minister within the Defence Ministry, called on Netanyahu and Katz to instruct the IDF to defy the order. No response from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara was reported in the window.

The same forty-eight hours put the man who indicted the prime minister in the witness box for the defence. Former attorney general Avichai Mandelblit testified at the Jerusalem District Court on 11 and 12 October, with defence counsel Amit Hadad arguing that police exceeded the scope of the approvals Mandelblit granted and that prosecutors withheld material from him. Reuters reported Mandelblit saying he would be surprised if prosecutors had concealed evidence and that he has “full trust in the prosecution, including the people sitting here”; Hadad said he believed Mandelblit had been “set up.” The Times of Israel reported him evasive on whether he had reviewed hundreds of specific examples and conceding that prosecutors had not told him Netanyahu was never questioned on most of them. Judge Rivka Feldman-Friedman questioned him directly. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana sat in the gallery.

Assessment: On the trial, read the headlines in pairs. The Times of Israel led on what the witness admitted; Reuters led on what he refused. Both are accurate and neither is the hearing. A defence witness who grants the process complaints while rejecting the conspiracy they are meant to prove is a mixed result being sold by each side as a clean one. On the camps, resist the constitutional-crisis frame for one more day: the court asked for a position paper, not for anyone to go home, and the deadline falls after the election. That is precisely why ministers can promise defiance now at no cost. The polling date reported as 27 October we have not confirmed with the Central Elections Committee.