What Does Roman Gofman’s Appointment as Mossad Chief Mean for Iran?
On 12 April 2026 the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office announced that the appointment of Major General Roman Gofman as director of the Mossad had been approved. The approval was given by the Advisory Committee for Senior Appointments by three votes to one, following a four-month review process that began in December 2025. Gofman will take over on 2 June 2026 from David Barnea, who is completing a five-year term.
The decision brings three fundamental elements onto the agenda at once. First, it is striking that the candidate comes from outside the organization. Second, it matters that the approval was given simultaneously with the closing of the negotiations conducted in Islamabad on 10-12 April 2026. Third, the fact that Gofman was among those who argued in pre-war planning meetings that the Iranian regime could disintegrate under military pressure points to the strategic background of this choice.
How did Gofman come to the post of military secretary?
Gofman was born in 1976 in the Belarusian city of Mazyr, emigrated to Israel with his family in 1990 and settled in Ashdod. He began his military service in 1995 in the 188th Armored Brigade of the IDF Armored Corps, and went on to command, in turn, the 75th Battalion, the Etzion Regional Brigade, the 7th Armored Brigade, the 210th Bashan Division and the Tze’elim Ground Forces Training Center. On the morning of 7 October 2023, while serving as commander of the Ground Forces Training Center, he was seriously wounded in a close-quarters exchange with Hamas attackers at the Sha’ar HaNegev junction. He was the highest-ranking IDF officer wounded that day. In May 2024 he was promoted to major general and appointed Netanyahu’s military secretary, a post in which he took a direct part in decision-making on the Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran fronts. His native-level Russian made him a sought-after and prominent figure in Netanyahu’s dealings with Moscow.
How does the appointment break with Mossad tradition?
Of the last eight Mossad directors serving since 1982, six rose from within the organization, and every director appointed in the past fifteen years has come from a Mossad background. Gofman is the third name to break with that tradition. The precedents are few and their records are opposed to one another. Meir Dagan (2002-2011) is remembered as one of the examples of an outsider who performed well in office. Danny Yatom, by contrast, was forced to resign within two and a half years after a failed assassination operation. This time, the sidelining of the two prominent internal candidates has strengthened expectations that both will resign once he takes up the post.
Another dimension of the break is the professional profile. It is reported that Gofman speaks no language other than Russian and Hebrew and will work with an interpreter in meetings with American and Western counterparts. Zini, appointed head of the Shin Bet, is said to have a similar linguistic limitation. The line along which the previous generation of Mossad chiefs maintained direct contact with Washington is changing radically with these two appointments. Gofman’s seniority as a major general is only two years, and over the course of his career he has not served in intelligence collection, special operations or inter-service liaison, the fields that form the backbone of the Mossad. Compared with the senior figures inside the organization, his process of settling into the post will take roughly two years. The picture that has emerged since 7 October 2023 suggests that Netanyahu is seeking a more comprehensive restructuring of the organization rather than limited renewal.
The Elmakayes file
The appointment passed the Advisory Committee for Senior Appointments by three votes to one. The committee’s chairman, former Supreme Court President Asher Grunis, wrote in a separate dissenting opinion that Gofman was not suitable for the post of Mossad director. At the centre of the dissent lies an operational file from 2022. At that date Gofman was commander of the 210th Bashan Division, deployed in the Golan Heights. Military intelligence officers under his command passed classified information to the 17-year-old Ori Elmakayes. Elmakayes published this information in Arabic through the Telegram channels he ran, and the purpose of the operation was described as conducting an influence campaign against Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. The arrangement was carried out without the authorization of the military hierarchy. Elmakayes was detained by the Shin Bet on suspicion of espionage, held in solitary confinement for two months, and after 18 months in custody the case against him was dropped.
In the military inquiry Gofman stated that the youth had taken part in the operation and that he had not known his age. Grunis did not find this defence convincing and noted that even if the defence were accepted as true, the episode pointed to a grave failure of command responsibility. The fact that two of the three members supporting the appointment could not access the classified documents in the file, and that the whole of Grunis’s dissent could not be shared with the public because of security restrictions, has opened the decision-making process itself to debate. After the appointment was formalized, Elmakayes and Telem – the Movement for Integrity in Government petitioned the Supreme Court to annul it. A hearing has been set for 5 May 2026.
Two further claims that reached the press in December 2025 suggest that the appointment was not weighed by professional criteria alone. The first is a report that Sara Netanyahu conducted an additional meeting with Gofman during the Mossad leadership selection process. The second is Eli Feldstein’s statement, under Shin Bet questioning, that he had passed classified military documents to Netanyahu and Gofman. Considered together, the two episodes show that political trust has been as decisive as professional competence. Feldstein’s statement forms part of the “Bild leak” investigation and directly contradicts Netanyahu’s public statement of November 2025, in which he said he had not known of the document before it was published in the media. In February 2026 Gofman gave testimony to Lahav 433 in connection with allegations concerning the Prime Minister’s Office Secretary General Tzachi Braverman; although he is not formally a suspect, he is one of the file’s points of contact.
What does the timing of the appointment indicate?
The fundamental element determining the strategic weight of the appointment is its timing. The approval fell on the same days as the closing of the US-Iran negotiations held in Islamabad on 10-12 April 2026. Gofman’s taking office on 2 June 2026 falls in the middle of the period in which the ceasefire order established after the Iran-US/Israel War that began on 28 February 2026 is settling into place. At a threshold where the Iran file is beginning to shift onto a diplomatic track, Netanyahu has chosen to place at the head of the organization the figure most inclined towards the use of hard power. That choice indicates that, whether or not the ceasefire holds, the post-war period will in the medium term be managed not only at the negotiating table but through operations conducted in the shadow of that table.
The second important variable is the concentration of the decision-making mechanism in a single hand. From 2 June 2026 both the Mossad and the Shin Bet will be led by two figures who come from outside their organizations and report directly to Netanyahu. The appointment of Major General (res.) David Zini to head the Shin Bet and of Gofman to the Mossad represents the reflection of the same political line in two separate institutions. The third leg of the pattern is the Israel Police. Police Commissioner Danny Levy, appointed in August 2024 by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, is known for his harsh handling of the 2023 anti-government protests. During his tenure he has banned pro-ceasefire demonstrations, and the promotion of the detective who testified in Netanyahu’s corruption trial was blocked for months by the minister. Tying the Mossad and the Shin Bet to the Prime Minister’s Office and the police to the hard edge of the coalition indicates that the security institutions are being realigned simultaneously on the basis of political loyalty.
The collective intelligence decision-making that weakened after 7 October 2023 is being replaced by the direct control of the Prime Minister’s Office. A loosening of the institutional oversight threshold on this scale means that operational decisions on the Iran file will be conducted more dependently on the preferences of the Prime Minister’s Office. The fourth front completing the picture is the judiciary. Justice Minister Yariv Levin does not recognize the appointment of Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit in January 2025. Arguing that Amit is not in office because Netanyahu did not sign the approval, he refuses to cooperate with him. The matter is not confined to procedure. The members of the state commission that would investigate the failure of 7 October 2023 are, in the normal order, appointed by the President of the Supreme Court. Not recognizing Amit means that this commission cannot be established. The government has instead advanced a bill that would have the members chosen by a Knesset majority. Tying the Mossad and the Shin Bet to the Prime Minister’s Office, placing the police at the hard edge of the coalition, refusing to recognize the President of the Supreme Court and blocking the 7 October commission of inquiry are reflections of the same strategy on four fronts.
Continuity in the Mossad’s Iran policy
One of the most striking dimensions of the appointment is that the strategic reading of Iran remains unchanged. According to a CNN report based on three Israeli sources, Gofman argued in pre-war planning meetings that the Iranian regime could disintegrate rapidly under military pressure. The same assessment was dominant within the Mossad under Barnea. According to information that has reached the press, the plan Barnea presented to Netanyahu and Donald Trump involved a three-stage design. The first stage consisted of assassinations of senior Iranian officials. In the second stage, intelligence operations were expected to activate the domestic opposition. In the third stage, the accumulation of protests and uprisings was intended to prepare the ground for the regime’s collapse. The IDF did not share this line, foregrounding instead the objective of weakening the regime and ripening the conditions for a popular movement.
In his Holocaust remembrance address of 14 April 2026, Barnea implied that the objective of regime change had not been completed and that the task had been handed to his successor. A strategic reading that proved wrong has not turned into institutional self-criticism; it has been reproduced as a definition of the task passed on to the next period. Gofman will take office not by questioning that legacy but by continuing it.
What course should be expected in the period ahead?
The reflection of the Gofman period on the Iran file can be followed along three lines. The first is the possibility that, if a ceasefire emerges between Iran and the United States or the war ends without driving the country into complete paralysis, the heavy damage Iran has sustained will “fester” over time, and on that ground sabotage and assassination activity will increase for the purposes of political engineering. In this framework the Mossad may be expected to turn towards more frequent and smaller-scale operations against command-and-control networks and supply chains rather than large-scale set-piece operations.
The second line is an intensification of targeted assassinations against Hezbollah’s structure. The experience of the northern border Gofman acquired while commanding the Bashan Division stands out as an element that could facilitate an increase in operations along this line.
The third line comprises operations on the Syria-Iraq axis against Shia militia structures and Iran-linked logistics and supply lines. The substantial disintegration of this corridor in the post-Assad period gives the Mossad the ability to intervene in networks that are in the process of reconstituting themselves. Accordingly, an increase in sabotage and targeted operations along that line is likely.
Taken together, these three lines indicate that in the Gofman period the Iran file will tend to advance through intelligence-based operations rather than overt military moves.
Gofman’s appointment as head of the Mossad is the choice of director that departs most markedly from the organization’s tradition since 2011. The appointment brings together the placing of an outside commander at the head of the organization, the institutional continuation of the expectation of regime change, and the passage of the Iran file into the direct management of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Taken separately, these three elements could be assessed as a familiar reorganization of security policy. Considered together, however, within the framework of the “Bild leak” investigation, the blocking of the 7 October commission of inquiry and the refusal to recognize the President of the Israeli Supreme Court, this choice reflects the security dimension of Netanyahu’s strategy of narrowing the field of his own personal accountability.
The period after June 2026 stands out as the span of time in which this model will be tested both for its operational results and for the costs it will generate in domestic politics.
This article was first published in IRAM on April 22, 2026.
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