From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
In swipe at Netanyahu, ex-Shin Bet chief Bar calls for state probe into Oct. 7
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Former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar calls for the government to establish a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion and massacre, in his first public address since leaving his post in June.
Speaking at Tel Aviv University’s Cyber Week 2025 conference, he focuses on the theme of responsibility and the importance of owning up to mistakes.
He opens his speech by singling out two victims of October 7 — Staff Sgt. Ofir Shoshani, a commander in the Israel Defense Force’s Intelligence Corps who was murdered in her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and Hersh GoldbergPolin, who was abducted from the Nova music festival and murdered in Hamas captivity.
He says he is reminding the audience of the people behind the statistics, as “only when you see them do you understand the meaning of responsibility and the price of making mistakes and failing.”
“When we thwart an attack, we can only imagine those we saved, and when we fail to thwart a massacre, we see with our own eyes who was murdered.”
“Responsibility is infinite — you cannot distribute it, only take it. And in leadership, it is better to take responsibility for failures than credit for achievements,” says Bar, who admitted responsibility in the first weeks of the war against Hamas for the Shin Bet’s failure to prevent the terror group’s onslaught.
He says that true leadership “does not end with taking responsibility for the failure. It ends with taking responsibility for fixing it,” and points to the Shin Bet’s actions on October 7 itself as its first step toward fixing its mistakes.
The next step to fix things, he says, was the internal investigation into the failures of October 7 carried out within the security agency, from which he said it has “learned how to be better.”
“But the only way to conduct a comprehensive investigation into this failure, to know what really happened, to dispel the conspiracies that endanger our continued existence, to learn what to fix and to ensure that it does not happen again is through a state commission of inquiry,” he declares.
He says the commission must be one led by professionals and that “sees the whole picture and knows how to tell the whole story and decide what needs to be done so that it does not happen again.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to allow a state commission of inquiry to be established, and his government is instead trying to establish its own probe, claiming that a sizable portion of the public would not accept the findings of a traditional state probe.
Returning to the opening theme of his speech, Bar tells the conference that Ofir and Hersh would want a state commission of inquiry, and that their families want a state commission of inquiry, and that “this is what our children expect from us.”
“Because,” he says, “the moment we did not decide to investigate the entire system, we essentially sentenced them to the next October 7.”
Bar left his post in June after Netanyahu’s cabinet voted to dismiss him, prompting a legal battle in the High Court of Justice.
The Times of Israel Community.