Ex-Shin Bet chiefs, top brass decry ‘unprecedented attacks’ on agency by PM and allies

A letter by former Shin Bet chiefs and department heads on Friday lambasted attacks on the security agency by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s associates, and called out the silence on the matter by the organization’s current head, David Zini.

“We have recently witnessed unprecedented attacks on former Shin Bet director [Ronen Bar] and his deputies, operatives, and employees that served in the organization on October 7 [2023], all from the entourage of the prime minister and from coalition members,” the letter read.

The letter also decried the premier’s 55-page document, made up of selected quotes from internal government deliberations in the years and months before the massacres, that he delivered to the state comptroller for the latter’s probe into the onslaught. Netanyahu published the document in an attempt to present himself as having sought tough action against Hamas, with security chiefs opposing this.

The document, as well as the spread of conspiracies over the October 7 massacre, “are part of attempts by the prime minister, with assistance from his mouthpieces, to distance himself from all responsibility over October 7 and are designed to condition the audience, mainly his ‘base,’ that there is no need for a state commission of inquiry, as the [supposedly] guilty parties are already known,” the letter alleged.

The letter panned the “silence” by the current Shin Bet head David Zini, and demanded that he “respond strongly against the targeting of public service employees [and] the spread of false conspiracies — such as the baseless claims that there was treason on the eve of October 7.”

The letter is signed by 31 former Shin Bet department heads and five former directors of the organization: Yaakov Peri, Carmi Gillon, Ami Ayalon, Yoram Cohen and Nadav Argaman.

It says that “members of the security establishment, led by Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, and Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, took responsibility and resigned. The only one who has consistently acted to absolve himself of any responsibility is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the assistance of his coalition partners.”

Netanyahu’s relationship with Bar became increasingly acrimonious in late 2024 and early 2025, culminating in his dismissal in March 2025, with Netanyahu saying he had lost faith in Bar’s ability to do his job. Bar initially fought the move in court but eventually agreed to step down in June. The prime minister and his associates have repeatedly pointed the finger at the Shin Bet and the military for failing to identify the threat prior to Oct. 7. The Israeli leader has sought to minimize his party, despite having served as prime minister since 2009, with the exception of 18 months in 2021-2022, and having presided over a policy of encouraging Qatar to send hundreds of millions of dollars into Hamas-run Gaza, which he publicly defended as essential to keep the peace.

Earlier this week, Netanyahu shared a post on social media accusing Bar of falsifying the intelligence agency’s probe into the Hamas-led assault and positioning himself as “de facto prime minister” after the attack.

The post was first published on X by former Likud spokesman Erez Tadmor last Friday. Netanyahu reposted it almost verbatim on his X account three days later, with attribution to Tadmor.

In the post, Tadmor claimed that Bar decided Netanyahu was “an illegitimate prime minister who has already dragged Israel into an unnecessary war [the 2014 Gaza war], and therefore — in order to prevent him from making another miscalculation — decided to appoint himself de facto prime minister on the night of the [October 7] massacre.”

He further claimed that “after the decisions he made led to the greatest disaster in the country’s history, Bar realized that the only thing worse than the reckless decisions themselves was that they were made as part of a rebellion against the prime minister — and decided to falsify the Shin Bet investigation.

“The top brass of the Shin Bet in particular and the top brass of the security establishment in general were infected with an anti-democratic virus,” Tadmor charged in the post shared by Netanyahu, adding that they had acted as though they were required to “protect the state of Israel from the prime minister.”

“After the rebellion they led ended in the most terrible disaster in the history of the state, they added sin to crime and embarked on a campaign of covering up, falsifying, and rewriting history,” Tadmor concluded.

There is little evidence for the allegations made by Tadmor and shared by Netanyahu.

Netanyahu and his government have resisted pressure to establish a state commission of inquiry for more than two years since the attack, claiming that, because a state commission is appointed by the judiciary – whose powers it has sought to curb – it would be biased against the government.

Opposition figures, government watchdog groups, protest organizations and the families of several former hostages have argued that a state commission is the only tool available to investigate the catastrophe in a politically independent and comprehensive manner.

Instead of forming a state commission, the government is advancing a bill that would create what the government calls a “national-state commission of inquiry,” where Netanyahu and his coalition — due to the opposition boycotting the proceedings, as expected — would get to handpick the commission’s members.