Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to Israeli public television on Wednesday to challenge the account of former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, who earlier in the day filed a defamation lawsuit accusing the premier of ignoring months of warnings before the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
Speaking to interviewer Ayala Hasson of the Kan public broadcaster, in what The Times of Israel described as a rare Hebrew-language interview, Netanyahu read aloud from what he presented as a Shin Bet intelligence assessment dated October 3, 2023, four days before the massacre. According to Netanyahu, the report suggested that Hamas wanted continued stability and that an economic arrangement with the terror group could keep Gaza quiet for an extended period.
Netanyahu acknowledged that security officials had warned him of a possible escalation during the turmoil over the government’s judicial overhaul, but insisted those warnings did not apply to the southern front.
“But they always excluded one arena: Gaza,” he said. “Gaza was outside the picture.”
The prime minister also said he had submitted close to 1,000 documents to the State Comptroller’s Office that he claims disprove Bar’s allegations in full, and accused Bar of refusing to cooperate with the comptroller’s investigation.
He charged that the High Court of Justice halted the comptroller’s October 7 inquiries shortly after he handed over the documents, and vowed to restart the investigation if he wins Israel’s election later this month. In a June ruling, the High Court found that State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman had exceeded his authority in examining several aspects of the October 7 failures, including how intelligence and government officials handled warnings of a possible attack, and ordered other probes redone over procedural flaws.
A Lawsuit and a Timeline
Bar’s suit, seeking NIS 3 million (about $970,000), responds to Netanyahu’s claim last month that Bar knew of the threat on the night of the attack and chose not to inform him. In a September 28 post on X, Netanyahu accused the media of trying to pin “Ronen Bar’s failures and crimes” on him.
According to The Times of Israel, the lawsuit lays out the Shin Bet’s actions in the early hours of October 7, including updates passed to the prime minister’s military secretariat, which Bar says was the formal channel between the security services and the premier. It also lists a series of warnings Bar says he delivered to Netanyahu between March and October 2023, including a July 23 call in which he says he issued a “strategic warning for war,” and repeated recommendations for preemptive action and targeted killings of Hamas leaders. Bar maintains that Netanyahu instructed security officials to keep the fall holiday season quiet.
Bar also wrote that, in real time, no one at the Shin Bet assessed that Hamas was heading toward an all-out assault.
Netanyahu dismissed Bar’s claim that he lacked the prime minister’s personal phone number, saying Bar had his secure line and could have called him immediately, as other security chiefs do.
On October 7, 2023, more than 5,000 terrorists, most of them from Hamas, invaded southern Israel, murdering some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Netanyahu has declined to establish a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the attack.
Reporting from The Times of Israel.
