A shadowy Education Ministry body has been monitoring the social media posts of school teachers and counselors who engage in public criticism of the government under the guise of combating incitement, Haaretz reported Wednesday.

According to the Hebrew daily, the ministry operates a body called the Incitement Committee tasked with compiling reports on and recommending disciplinary action against employees over their speech inside and outside the classroom.

Though the government said the body has existed since 2016, Haaretz cited unnamed Education Ministry officials who claimed most of its activity has been conducted over the past three years, coinciding with the uptick in protests against the coalition’s judicial overhaul.

The committee is reportedly led by Lior Tuvia, a former high-ranking Shin Bet official who now serves as the head of the Education Ministry’s security department.

The Education Ministry, headed by the Likud party’s Yoav Kisch, said in a response to Haaretz that the body only probes employees when there is suspicion of “incitement, identification with terror or transgression of the law.”

But the body’s activities, as illustrated by Haaretz, appeared to deal mostly with political expression, especially criticism of the current government and its policies.

One of the committee’s reports obtained by the Hebrew daily concerned Yaron Avni, a 59-year-old school counselor who was probed in 2023 following an anonymous complaint filed against him for alleged “incitement........

© The Times of Israel