PM: ‘Fact, not conspiracy’ Shin Bet chief knew Oct. 7 attack likely, didn’t wake me

After previously doing so anonymously, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday claimed that Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar knew several hours before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre that an invasion by the terror group was likely but did not alert him.

“This is a fact and not a conspiracy,” a statement from the premier’s office read, asserting that at 4:30 that morning, “it was already clear to the outgoing Shin Bet head that an invasion of the State of Israel was likely.”

The statement went on to ask: “Why at that moment did he not wake up the prime minister? Why didn’t he warn the community heads in the Gaza periphery? Why was the prime minister’s military secretary only updated minutes before the start of the attack?”

The statement repeated a narrative that an “Israeli official” — who Channel 12 identified as the prime minister himself — peddled to media outlets last week as the cabinet sat down to fire Bar.

Netanyahu has said publicly that he lost faith in the Shin Bet chief after some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were murdered and 251 hostages taken when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists rampaged through southern communities on October 7, 2023. Security forces were caught unprepared, and their delayed response to the invasion enabled large numbers of terrorists to enter many communities freely for several hours, carrying out mass murder.

Critics of the prime minister have instead accused him of seeking to fire Bar due to an ongoing Shin Bet probe of alleged ties between Netanyahu’s top aides and Qatar, which backs Hamas. Bar himself, in a letter to the cabinet last week, said that he issued “countless warnings to the political echelon” ahead of the October 7 massacre, and said Netanyahu’s purported reasons for firing him include “baseless claims, serving only as a cover for entirely different, improper motives.”

The premier’s statement Thursday came despite him having acknowledged earlier this month that his intelligence officer received an IDF memo detailing suspicious Hamas activity three hours before the terror onslaught but did not pass it on. The Prime Minister’s Office argued at the time that this decision was justified given what it said was the document’s non-urgent framing.

Netanyahu has sought to shift the responsibility for the colossal failure of October 7 onto the shoulders of the security establishment, arguing he was not woken up in the hours before the invasion when signs of impending attack were being picked up by Israel’s intelligence services, while denying he bought into the “conception” that Hamas was more interested in governing Gaza than attacking Israel.

The prime minister had for years appeased the terror group with policies sending Qatari funds into Gaza, issuing work permits for Gazans and ordering limited responses to attacks.

In their investigations into Hamas’s brutal onslaught, both the IDF and Shin Bet have admitted colossal failures surrounding October 7. The IDF’s probes have determined that it identified several signs of unusual Hamas activity the night before the massacre but did not believe the terror group was about to launch an attack.

The Shin Bet’s probe, a summation of which has been published, acknowledged gaps in the “handling of information and integration of intelligence” as one of several factors contributing to the agency’s failure to issue an alert in the hours before the invasion.

“If the Shin Bet had acted differently, in the years leading up to the attack and during the night of the attack — both at the professional and the managerial level — the massacre would have been avoided. This is not the standard we expected of ourselves, or that the public expected of us,” Bar wrote when the summation was released.

The unfounded allegation that the military and/or security agencies had advance knowledge of the Hamas attack and deliberately ignored it, facilitating the Hamas massacre, has been peddled online, including by pro-Netanyahu conspiracy theorists, since soon after October 7, but not hitherto directly advanced by the prime minister.

Lazar Berman contributed to this report.