Israel’s Attorney General Orders Prison Chief to Bar Ben-Gvir From Campaign Filming Inside Jails

Israel’s most senior government lawyer has told the head of the Israeli Prison Service to stop National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from filming election campaign videos inside prisons, a rare public rebuke from within the cabinet to a minister whose ministry oversees the very facilities he wanted to use as a backdrop. ^[1][2]

The directive, reported by Haaretz and the Jewish Rhody news site, comes roughly two and a half weeks before Israel’s national elections. Ben-Gvir, who leads the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, has served as minister since 2022 and controls the Prison Service through his ministry. That authority is what makes the Attorney General’s instruction unusual. The legal adviser to the government is not telling a rival party to stay out of prisons. She is telling a senior minister to stay out of a state institution he is supposed to administer neutrally.

The concern is not abstract. Israeli media reports have described a pattern in which Ben-Gvir appeared in prison settings with inmates to project toughness on security. According to reports citing Channel 12, the Attorney General’s office framed the instruction as a way to prevent political messaging from seeping into the prison system while the election campaign is underway. ^[3][4]

The clearest example so far involves a video Ben-Gvir recorded with Hassan Salameh, a Hamas terrorist serving a sentence for suicide bombings that killed Israeli civilians in 1996. According to reports citing Channel 13, the head of Israel’s Central Elections Committee ordered Ben-Gvir to remove the video, ruling that it amounted to banned election propaganda funded by public resources, and fined him and his party 20,000 shekels in legal costs. ^[5] Those figures come from a single chain of partisan Telegram reposts of a Channel 13 report, and I could not independently confirm the fine amount from the Israeli sources available to me.

Ben-Gvir’s defenders argue that his ministry has the right to show conditions inside prisons and that his tough line on terrorist prisoners is popular with voters who lost family in attacks. Critics respond that a minister who films inmates for campaign material is using captive people as props, and that the prisoners cannot consent to the use of their images or refuse to be part of a political message. Both arguments touch the question at the center of this story: how a democracy balances the free expression of its politicians against the rights and security of the people held in its custody.

Israel’s legal system has tried to answer that question through institutions rather than through prisoners themselves. The Attorney General and the Elections Committee are acting as checks on the executive, using electoral law and the principle that public resources should not serve a party. That is a legitimate and necessary role. It is also a reminder that the protections for political prisoners in Israel depend heavily on officials who sit outside the prison walls, and that those officials can be overruled, ignored or pressured by the minister responsible for the prisons.

Security officials have raised their own concerns this year. A senior Shin Bet official was reported saying recent arrests in Shiqib al-Salam pointed to Israeli activists forming cells, some with military backgrounds, to carry out operations inside Israel. ^[6] Whatever the merits of that assessment, it underscores how heated the security debate has become, and how easily security rhetoric can be turned into campaign material.

For ordinary Israelis, the question is whether the country’s election rules are enforced the same way for a minister as for a backbench candidate. For the prisoners whose faces and cases are used in these videos, the question is simpler: whether anyone in the system is still asking what consent and dignity require when a person is behind bars.

What to watch in the coming days is whether the Prison Service formally carries out the Attorney General’s instruction, whether Ben-Gvir complies or challenges it in court, and whether the Elections Committee’s ruling on the Salameh video is enforced. Those three steps will show whether Israel’s checks on political messaging inside prisons hold up under campaign pressure.

Amilia Ice, Human Rights Correspondent