Reports: Ben Gvir calls for Shin Bet chief be fired for ‘interfering in politics’

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir reportedly demands during a meeting of the security cabinet that Shin Bet head Ronan Bar be fired, after Channel 12 published a letter the security chief wrote warning of the dangers of extremist settler violence in the West Bank.

In the letter published by the television network, Bar also decried Ben Gvir’s contentious visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem last week, which drew international condemnation as a “provocation.”

According to the Israel Hayom and Maariv daily newspapers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other cabinet ministers defend the Shin Bet chief after Ben Gvir claims that Bar is responsible for the failures leading to Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

He accuses Bar of “a failure in intelligence and constantly turning a blind eye to terrorism and the enemy that planned mass murder for years” and “cooperating with the protest movement that weakened the army,” in an apparent reference to mass protests that swept the country last year over the government’s judicial overhaul protest.

Ben Gvir also charges the Shin Bet chief of incitement against him and “interfering with politics.”