Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Ronen Bar lied, and did not alert Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the dangers of Hamas, nor did he wake him on the morning of October 7, said the prime minister in his sworn affidavit on Sunday.
The affidavit was submitted to the High Court of Justice per its extension given on Thursday, the original deadline. What happens next is up to the court.
Bar said in his affidavit that at 11 p.m. on October 6, military officers in the South received updates on activity in the enclave that was out of the ordinary. At 1:33 a.m. on October 7, a Shin Bet unit was sent to the South, fearing a concentrated infiltration attack.
Then, he wrote, at 3:03 a.m., the agency put out an alert describing the possibility of Hamas attacks, and at 4:30 a.m., held a situational assessment. At 5:15 a.m., he wrote, he instructed to update Netanyahu's military secretary.
“Bar's claim that he warned of the war, that he alerted everybody, is a lie. His blindness is the greatest intelligence failure Israel has ever seen,” wrote the prime minister. Bar did not wake the prime minister or the defense minister.
He also didn't alert the local emergency standby squads and the security chiefs in the kibbutzim in the South, nor did he instruct to evacuate and shut down the Nova music festival, where the heart of the massacre occurred, and where 393 people were killed.
Bar said at that meeting, according to Netanyahu, that the alertness level is “at a medium to avoid a miscalculation… we want to be careful with our moves.” He also suggested “refraining from a widespread plan.”
In the affidavit from last week, Bar asserted that Netanyahu decided to fire him due to a series of measures that posed political threats.
These include Bar’s refusal to approve security measures that would have delayed Netanyahu’s testimony in his criminal trial hearings; the Shin Bet’s investigations into figures close to the prime minister, as well as the agency's probe into October 7; and Bar’s insistence on the formation of State Commission of Inquiry, which the government has opposed.
Bar added that Netanyahu pressured him to use tools reserved for subversion or threats of violence against leaders and “financiers” of the protests against the judicial reforms.
Bar's dismissal
The issue is the contentious firing of Bar by the government back in March. The government claimed a “lack of trust” between the prime minister and the agency head, which it said began already on October 7, and that Bar should have resigned of his own accord after the Shin Bet probe into October 7 was issued.
The Attorney-General’s Office, which would normally represent the government in such a decision, has been fiercely opposed to the move, saying that it was not done according to procedure. Petitioners argued that Bar’s firing is political, not professional, and stems from the agency’s investigations into two cases concerning figures close to Netanyahu: The leaked documents case and the “Qatargate” case.
After a court hearing on the matter on April 8, Chief Justice Isaac Amit, Deputy Chief Justice Noam Sohlberg, and Justice Dafna Barak Erez pushed for a compromise. He requested that the government and Bar each submit separate affidavits, which could include classified elements. The goal, it said, was to encourage both sides to reach a compromise without further involvement from the court in what should be a legislative matter.
Former Netanyahu spokesman Eli Feldstein was arrested in November, along with IDF reservist NCO Ari Rosenfeld, for leaking confidential documents from inside the military to German daily Bild. The documents concerned Hamas’s grasp of how its stance on the hostage negotiations was affecting Israeli society and policy. They were allegedly intended to sway public opinion within Israel about the government’s stance on the matter.
The contents of the documents were originally presented to an Israeli journalist, but they were not published due to the military censor. To get them published, Israel Einhorn, a former Netanyahu aide who is of interest in the case and is currently residing in Serbia, allegedly facilitated the transfer to Bild.
The efforts to fire Bar began much later than October 7, said the intelligence chief in his affidavit. He added that the efforts to fire him began in earnest in November, coinciding with the Feldstein saga.
Then, in February, reports emerged of Qatari connections to Feldstein and former Netanyahu aide Yonatan Urich, who both worked closely with the prime minister and allegedly pushed public relations narratives for the Gulf state, in exchange for payment.
They supposedly fed information to Israeli journalists, presenting them as coming from security and diplomatic sources, when, in actuality, they came from Qatar. The goal was to boost Qatar’s role as a mediator in the Gaza hostage and ceasefire negotiations, and to lessen that of Egypt’s, the other main mediator. Qatar denied any such initiative.
This is being investigated by the Shin Bet as well as the police.
