Netanyahu’s office chastises Shin Bet chief, says his probe doesn’t ‘answer any question’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issues a scathing attack on Shin Bet head Ronen Bar, charging that the findings of the internal probe he ordered into the agency’s failure to prevent Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught “don’t answer any question.”

The Shin Bet findings, while detailing failures and saying it could have foiled the attack had it acted differently, largely point the blame outwards, including hinting that successive governments took insufficiently offensive policies regarding Hamas, including avoiding targeting the terror group’s leaders as the agency allegedly advocated.

“The conclusions of the Shin Bet probe don’t match the gravity of the immense failure of the agency and its head,” says a statement attributed to Netanyahu’s “circle.”

The statement claims Bar “completely failed” to counter the Hamas threat in general and on October 7, “misread the intelligence picture” and had a misconception regarding the level of threat it posed, arguing that the Shin Bet had contended right up to the invasion that the terror group wanted to keep the quiet.

It contends that on October 1, Bar recommended civilian concessions to Hamas in exchange for quiet, and cautioned against targeting Hamas’s leaders. It adds that in an October 3 document, Bar wrote that Hamas sought to avoid a round of fighting against Israel and saw a potential for stability if Gaza was given a positive economic horizon.

It says the Shin Bet didn’t mention or deal with Hamas’s “Jericho Walls” plan, “even though the Shin Bet knew about the plan since 2018,” and accuses Bar of not waking Netanyahu up on the night of October 6-7, “the most basic and natural decision imaginable.”