Five former police commissioners and 33 retired superintendents appealed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to remove National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from his post.
The officials plan to take part in a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Saturday night under the title: ‘Save the police from Ben-Gvir.’
They wrote that they have “identified processes on the part of the minister in charge of the police, in which he acts contrary to the powers granted to him by law.”
“The minister interferes in the decision-making process of operational events and exploits the events and the police for his political purposes,” the commissioners and other former officials claimed. “As those who commanded dozens of incidents and know the sensitivity and responsibility required during these incidents – we were required to take the unusual step of making this appeal to you.”
“We were recently informed that the minister ordered the police officers to continue the work of executing building demolition orders in Jerusalem even during Ramadan. Deviating from the police’s priorities for the sake of the minister’s political needs could have an unnecessary security cost,” they wrote.

The letter was signed by former Police Commissioners Roni Alsheikh, Shlomo Aharonishki, Asaf Hefetz, Rafi Peled, and Moshe Karadi.
According to the officials, “anyone who has experienced commanding the events of the month of Ramadan as commander of the Jerusalem district and as commissioner knows that [continuing demolishing illegally-constructed buildings] is a step that is no less than throwing a lit match into a barrel of gunpowder, which may at best bring upon us the third intifada and at worst ignite an unnecessary fire among the Muslim world outside to the borders of the state, unnecessarily.”