Citing transcripts, PM calls Bar’s claim he was fired for political reasons ‘total lies’

In a vehement, furious defense of his conduct, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected claims made by Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar that the security chief was fired for personal or political motives, repeatedly calling Bar’s allegations “total lies” in an affidavit filed to the High Court of Justice on Sunday afternoon.

Bringing direct quotations from minutes of meetings he and Bar conducted in 2023 and 2024, Netanyahu sought to refute claims he had pressured the Shin Bet head into helping him postpone his testimony in his criminal trial, as well to counter Bar’s allegations he tried to have the security chief use the agency against legitimate anti-government protest.

Netanyahu also sought to dispel Bar’s claim that the prime minister told him that he must obey the premier in a potential constitutional crisis and not the Supreme Court. Unlike the other accusations made by Bar, however, Netanyahu did not explicitly call this claim a lie.

The prime minister, in his affidavit, also accused Bar of bearing “massive and direct responsibility” for failing to prevent the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion and massacre, accusing him of a fundamental misreading of the security situation in the hours leading up to the attack and of a “historic failure.”

Netanyahu’s affidavit was filed to the High Court in response to Bar’s affidavit last week, in which the Shin Bet accused the prime minister of firing him not for professional failings but because of his resistance to requests from the premier motivated by political and personal considerations.

Both documents were submitted in the framework of petitions to the High Court asking it to reverse the government decision on March 21 to fire Bar, on Netanyahu’s recommendation.

The High Court froze the decision to dismiss Bar, pending its ruling on the issue.

In a hearing on the petitions on April 8, the court appeared inclined to merely resolve procedural problems with Bar’s dismissal, but the severe allegations Bar made against Netanyahu in his affidavit appeared to have made it difficult for the court to ignore the substance of the claims against the prime minister.

Netanyahu’s emphatic rejection of the allegations, backed up by direct quotes from Bar in official minutes and government documents, will likely mean, however, that the court ends up promoting an effort to remedy the procedural problems with Bar’s dismissal, due to its functional inability to adjudicate the competing claims between the prime minister and the Shin Bet chief.

Following Netanyahu’s affidavit, Bar said the prime minister’s claims were “full of inaccuracies, biased quotes, and half-truths aimed at taking things out of context and changing reality,” and insisted his allegations were true and backed up by evidence he submitted to the court.

Netanyahu denies trying to have Bar enable him to avoid testifying in his criminal trial

The prime minister in his affidavit dealt first with Bar’s claim that Netanyahu tried to have him submit a position paper to the Jerusalem District Court, where he is standing trial on corruption charges, stating that the prime minister could not make regular appearances in court due to security concerns he could be targeted there by the terror groups the country is at war with.

Bar has alleged that it was his refusal to comply with this request that was the major reason behind what Netanyahu said was his “loss of faith” in the Shin Bet chief, which prompted him to fire Bar.

The Jerusalem District Court has no bomb-proof spaces and Netanyahu’s hearings were ultimately relocated to a bomb-proof room in the Tel Aviv District Court following discussions between Shin Bet officials and the court’s administration.

Netanyahu pointed out that the first meeting he and Bar had on the issue of his security during his court testimony was on October 20, 2024, the day after a Hezbollah drone hit Netanyahu’s private residence in Caesarea.

It was this meeting that Bar pointed to in his confidential affidavit as “the beginning of the pressure” on him to have the prime minister’s testimony postponed, but Netanyahu said Bar hid the pertinent fact of the timing of the meeting from the court in his submission.

Netanyahu added that on October 27, the Security Cabinet held a discussion on the threat of missile and drone attacks against senior government officials, but that the Shin Bet did not issue instructions to that forum as to how to act.

Netanyahu said that because of that, a draft document with a “summary of requested general instructions arising from the strategic threat of harm to the prime minister” was “passed to the head of the Shin Bet.”

Netanyahu said that this document did not discuss his trial at all, but that it was the same document that Bar alleged Netanyahu wanted him to submit to the Jerusalem District Court as evidence of his ostensible effort to have Bar unlawfully convince the judges to postpone his testimony.

The prime minister also cited comments he made to Bar from a stenographer’s transcript of a meeting he and Bar held on the topic on November 13, 2024, when he said that Bar needed to provide him with options for him to testify safely, “so that I can on the one hand carry out my testimony, and on the other hand [for me] not to die, and so that the legal teams, the judges etc, don’t die together with me.”

According to the transcript cited by Netanyahu, the prime minister also told Bar: “I am not interested in delaying [testimony] by one day. They [the judges] ruled what they ruled, I want to show up there. In order [for me] to show up you must act quickly.”

Netanyahu cited himself as telling Bar the same thing in a second meeting on the issue on November 17.

“At no point did I ask Bar to invent a position paper establishing that my testimony could not be held. This claim is totally false. The opposite is true, I said to him explicitly that I want to testify and that the trial should not be delayed by even one day,” wrote the prime minister in his affidavit.

PM rejects allegations he sought to have Shin Bet act against legitimate, anti-government activists

Netanyahu also insisted he never asked Bar to use the resources and authorities of the domestic security agency against peaceful anti-government activists as Bar alleged, calling the claim “a total falsehood.”

Bar was referring to activists who followed government ministers around and protested against them wherever they appeared in public, as part of the protest movement against the government’s judicial overhaul agenda in the first half of 2023.

Netanyahu said when he spoke to Bar about the issue on June 6, 2023, he was worried about “violent incidents against elected officials and attempts to harm my family,” and asked for input from the attorney general as to what could be considered legitimate protest and what was illegal.

“I want to bring in the attorney general because I want to understand what the limits of the law are,” Netanyahu cited himself as saying, quoting from the formal transcript of the June 6 meeting with Bar. “It isn’t clear to me what the limits are of harassment and persecution,” continued Netanyahu in that meeting, asking the Shin Bet chief if such activity was legal.

“I don’t know to tell you,” replied Bar, according to the transcript.

Netanyahu also stated that despite Bar’s claim that the prime minister had tried to make an unlawful request to have the Shin Bet act against non-violent, anti-government activists, in a conversation that took place without the presence of a stenographer during a meeting on March 7, 2023, the minutes of the meeting showed that it had actually been Bar who requested the stenographer leave the meeting.

Netanyahu added that in the majority of cases when the two spoke without a stenographer, it was Bar who requested it.

Netanyahu stops short of denying claim he told Bar to obey him and not Supreme Court

In a less emphatic section of the affidavit, Netanyahu tried to dispel Bar’s allegation that he told the Shin Bet chief to obey him and not the Supreme Court in the event of a constitutional crisis.

Netanyahu said that there was no record of such comments in the meeting in which Bar alleged they were made, but did not issue an outright denial.

“It should be pointed out that from the minutes of the meeting from that date [March 22, 2023] there is no mention of a conversation on [that] topic, for sure there are no quotes which he included in his confidential affidavit,” wrote Netanyahu.

The prime minister did not, however, call the claim “a total falsehood,” as he did Bar’s claims about the issue of his testimony and using the Shin Bet against legitimate protest.

Netanyahu attacks Bar’s claims regarding his conduct in the hours before Oct. 7 attack

Although less directly connected to the substance of the accusations made by Bar and the petitioners to the High Court, Netanyahu sought to refute Bar’s claims that the Shin Bet chief issued warnings, albeit of insufficient urgency, to the security services over an impending Hamas attack in the hours preceding the October 7 invasion and massacre.

Bar said in his submission that he took steps to alert the IDF and the security agencies to a heightened possibility of a Hamas attack, and that he updated the prime minister’s military secretary at 5:15 a.m. on the morning of October 7.

But Netanyahu said Bar failed to alert him or the defense minister, that his evaluation of the developing security situation was deficient in the extreme, and that the the summary of the security evaluation Bar sent to the military secretary only arrived at 9:47 a.m., more than three hours after the beginning of the Hamas attack.

Quoting from the 5:15 a.m. evaluation, Netanyahu pointed out that Bar said that the readiness for an attack should be “medium, secret readiness in order not to create a miscalculation,” and “to avoid broad actions by us in order to avoid miscalculation given the fact that this is not a leading assumption.”

Wrote Netanyahu of Bar: “He was clinging to his mistaken perspective, and prevented the carrying out of necessary actions, just out of a concern that Hamas would interpret it as readiness for war on Israel’s part and open up a war against us.” The prime minister added that Bar prevented Israeli defensive actions “at a time when Hamas had already opened up a war.”

The prime minister also accused Bar of “concealing” the principal content of that evaluation from the High Court in the affidavit he submitted last week.

“If Bar would have called on the IDF to prepare at high readiness and not ‘medium, secret,’ to send all ground and air forces to the Gaza border region, and if he would have determined not to ‘avoid broad actions,’ but rather the opposite, instructed the IDF to initiate it immediately, the massacre would have been avoided,” claimed Netanyahu.

“As such, Bar bears massive and direct responsibility for failing to prevent the massacre,” alleged the prime minister.

PM cites Bar’s comments that Hamas leadership wanted to act with ‘restraint’ in Gaza

Netanyahu also sought to argue that unlike Bar’s claim in his affidavit, the Shin Bet chief had repeatedly assessed in the months leading up to October 7 that Hamas and its then leader Yahya Sinwar had adopted a policy of “restraint” inside Gaza and did not want to risk what they had built inside the territory.

“In the Strip, the Hamas leadership has in internal discussions validated the strategy of restraint in the Strip, and inflaming [the situation] in the West Bank,” quoted the prime minister from a background briefing Bar sent Netanyahu on April 4, 2023.

In a meeting on July 2, 2023 to evaluate Hamas’s control of Gaza, Netanyahu said Hamas was likely holding discussions over the societal divisions in Israel surrounding the government’s judicial overhaul agenda, and asked how Hamas was viewing the situation.

“The product [of Hamas’s discussions] is to look at the West Bank,” stated one intelligence official whom Netanyahu cited from minutes of that meeting.

“But not to endanger the Gazan project, and this is a very delicate balance,” added Bar at the time.

Netanyahu also quoted from a security document Bar sent him on October 3, 2023, in which the Shin Bet chief said that “looking forward, renewing understandings between Hamas and Israel on the familiar basis of ‘security quiet in exchange for relief’ has the potential for preserving stability in the strip (possibly even in the long-run) especially if Israel and the rest of the players stand by the promise of creating a positive economic horizon.”

Netanyahu cites proximate causes of his loss of trust in Bar

To further underline Netanyahu’s claim that he fired Bar on professional grounds, the prime minister also listed a series of incidents which he said contributed to his declining trust in the Shin Bet leader.

Bar alleged in his affidavit that Netanyahu’s dissatisfaction with him began in November 2024, surrounding the issue of the prime minister’s testimony in his criminal trial.

But Netanyahu listed a series of incidents before that date. This included a claim disseminated by the Shin Bet in October 2023 that it had issued warnings of war before the October 7 attacks and the outbreak of conflict, “a claim which I knew to be false,” said Netanyahu.

He also said that in May 2024 he gave Bar a dressing down for holding security discussions with the defense minister and other security agency heads “who are under my authority” but without informing Netanyahu.

The prime minister also cited the mistaken release of the head of the Shifa hospital from an Israeli prison approved by a senior Shin Bet official as another reason for his declining confidence in Bar.

And Netanyahu said that in July 2024 he expressed his dissatisfaction with Bar’s role in the negotiations for the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

In Bar’s affidavit, the Shin Bet chief said the timing of his dismissal was connected to his investigations into the prime minister’s close aides, referring to the classified documents scandal and the so-called Qatargate affair. Indeed, the petitions against Bar’s dismissal argued that Netanyahu and the government had a conflict of interest in firing him because of those investigations.

Netanyahu rejected this allegation, arguing that the Qatargate investigation was only opened in February 2025 while noting that Bar himself had said Netanyahu’s loss of faith in him began in November 2024. The classified documents case blew up, however, in late October, when a spokesperson for Netanyahu, Eli Feldstein, was arrested in connection with that affair.

Bar denounces Netanyahu’s ‘inaccuracies, biased quotes, and half-truths’

In a statement to the press following Netanyahu’s rejection of Bar’s allegations, the Shin Bet chief insisted that all of his allegations were “absolutely true,” and were supported by the documentation he provided to the court.

“The things the prime minister wrote in his affidavit are full of inaccuracies, biased quotes, and half-truths aimed at taking things out of context and changing reality,” said Bar.

“Senior security officials have taken responsibility for the intelligence failure [on October 7.] But the prime minister never took responsibility for the quiet policy of funding Hamas, which was dictated directly by the prime minister.

“This historic failure of mistaken policy built Hamas, eroded deterrence and contributed to fears of miscalculation in the decision-making of senior security officials that night.”