Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of his hard-right coalition lashed out at the Shin Bet after the Kan public broadcaster published a recording of the chief of the security agency’s Jewish Division saying that radical settler youths were arrested and held without evidence, and calling them “shmucks.”

Netanyahu’s office vowed a thorough investigation of the matter.

In the tape, Cdr. Avishai Mualem — a senior officer in the police’s West Bank division who is suspected of ignoring Jewish nationalist attacks to curry favor with National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir — speaks with the Shin Bet official, who can only be identified by the Hebrew initial “Aleph.”

The two discuss arrests made under the controversial practice of administrative detention, which enables individuals to be held without charge for up to six months at a time, under limited court review.

While the practice is primarily deployed against Palestinians to prevent terror, administrative detention has also been used against some extremist Jewish Israelis, which has drawn increasing criticism of the ruling Likud party by its far-right coalition members.

The broadcaster did not specify when the recording was made. In November, Defense Minister Israel Katz declared the end of the use of administrative detention against West Bank settlers, and in January, released those being held without charges.

The recording aired by Kan begins with Mualem and the Shin Bet officer discussing where to hold some Jewish detainees as they wait for the defense minister to sign off on the administrative detention orders.

“Right,” Aleph says in response to Mualem’s suggestion that they be put in holding cells. “We always want to arrest them for interrogation, as much as possible.”

“You see how they deal with Shin Bet investigations. We arrest these shmucks without evidence for a few days,” adds the Shin Bet officer.

“They will tear into us over that,” Muallem protests, but Aleph assures him it is being handled by the Shin Bet chief’s office in coordination with the defense minister.

Aleph is also heard pressing Mualem to arrest potential suspect settlers in the hope of catching them with incriminating material.

“What, arrest them for the sake of it?” Mualem asks.

Aleph also dismisses the IDF presence in the West Bank as being sub-standard, claiming that the army has sent its soldiers to fight in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon while those deployed to the West Bank are “militias, the settlers themselves.”

The remarks appeared to indicate that the conversation was from sometime around September 2023 onwards, when Israel was battling against the Palestinian terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and against the terror group Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

In response to the recording, the Shin Bet said the conversation “solely addressed lawbreakers suspected of violence, who took the law into their own hands.”

The statement nevertheless said that “the content and style of the remarks that were said do not suit the values and professional conduct of the agency,” and that Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar would examine the matter.

“Arrests of Israeli citizens who are suspected of terror activities are done after professional considerations are exercised and a careful examination of the intelligence material… and is again examined with outside and independent judicial criticism by the court,” the statement added.

A statement from the Prime Minister’s Office called “the shocking recording… a substantive threat to democracy.”

It said that in light of the revelations, the prime minister will demand a thorough check of the Jewish division’s activities.

“Only in dark regimes do the secret police act in this dangerous way,” added the statement from the premier, who is currently working to oust Bar amid the so-called Qatarqate probe into Netanyahu’s aides’ allegedly illicit ties with Qatar.

Interior Minister Moshe Arbel asked the Justice Ministry to open a clarification of the matter and then publish the results, Kan reported.

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who backs the settler movement, said the recordings “prove black on white the criminality of the Shin Bet’s Jewish division and the hypocrisy of the Israeli legal system that covers up its lies and for long years has approved its activities.”

In a post on X, Smotrich called for the immediate firing of the division head and for him to be brought to trial.

Regarding Bar, he said the Shin Bet chief, “caused and continues to cause insane damage to the organization, and is eroding the public’s trust in it.”

Allied far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir also called for ousting the head of the Jewish division. He promised to ask Netanyahu to summon Bar to provide clarifications.

“This is mafia-like behavior, illegal hounding of settlers,” he posted to X. The time has come to stop criminality under the protection of the law.

Negev, Galilee and National Resilience Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf, a member of Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, posted to X an account of an incident he said happened 11 years ago when he was a week from completing his IDF service.

According to Wasserlauf, following a security incident at a base that was probed by military police and that he was not involved in, he was summoned by the Shin Bet for an interview in which he was warned to stay away from, among other far-right extremists, Ben Gvir, being told he was “close to problematic people.”

Wasserlauf said he was advised by a friend at the time to not make a fuss about the incident.

“The Shin Bet doesn’t differentiate between friend or foe,” he wrote. The published recordings “lead to one conclusion: The Jewish division of the Shin Bet needs to close and the head of the division needs to be fired.”

A total of 16 administrative detention orders were issued for Jewish Israelis under former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and seven of them were still being held as of November last year.

Gallant, who was defense minister until that month, wrote on X that he “completely condemns the serious things” said by the head of the Jewish division.

Remarks against the settler public and the IDF in the West Bank are “invalid, dangerous, and have no place in the security system.”

But he also spoke out against the extremist settlers who are among the key subjects of the Shin Bet Jewish Division’s mission.

“The Jewish rioters who are erupting against the Arab population are dangerous extremists who need decisive and resolute treatment,” he wrote while stressing “they do not in any way represent” the West Bank settlers.

Netanyahu fired Gallant in November last year, citing disagreements and a mutual lack of trust.

The investigation against Muallem revolves around the suspicion that his department conducted sham investigations into acts of Jewish nationalistic crimes in the West Bank, merely to give the appearance that probes were being conducted without actually bringing perpetrators to account.

According to a report in the Haaretz newspaper this month, suspicions have also been raised that Muallem repeatedly and deliberately ignored information passed to him and his unit by the Shin Bet’s nationalistic crimes department about the involvement of far-right extremists in attacks on Palestinians.

Muallem’s alleged refusal to tackle Jewish extremism stemmed from a desire to curry favor with Ben Gvir and obtain promotion within the police. Ben Gvir is himself an ultranationalist with a history of criminal convictions before he entered politics.

War in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led a devastating invasion of southern Israel. The following day, Hezbollah began attacking along the northern border and that conflict spiraled into war by September 2024, ending with a ceasefire at the end of November.

The war in Gaza, still ongoing despite a ceasefire for several weeks that began in January but then collapsed, has seen a spike in extremist settler attacks on West Bank Palestinians.