Times of Israel
The head of the Shin Bet security agency, Ronen Bar, warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July 2023 that war was all but certain for Israel if the government continued to plow ahead with its controversial judicial overhaul, a report said Friday, amid the defense and political echelons’ ongoing blame game surrounding October 7.
According to the outlet, on July 23, 2023 — a day before the government passed the first major piece of its contentious judicial overhaul legislation — Bar told Netanyahu: ‘Today I give you a warning of war. We don’t know the day and time in which it will break out, but this is the indication.’
Later that day, with Netanyahu’s blessing, Bar reportedly issued the same warning to Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, who relied on the information to warn of a ‘violent, multifront confrontation’ in a September 20 press conference.
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) pushed back on Ynet’s report, saying Netanyahu ‘did not receive a warning about the war in Gaza — not on the purported date stated in the article and not a moment before 6:29 a.m. on October 7,’ when Hamas fired a massive rocket barrage that gave cover to its thousands-strong invasion and onslaught.
The report came after Channel 12 news on Thursday reported that in early October — three or four days before October 7 — the Shin Bet had assessed that Hamas chief Sinwar was uninterested in ‘getting involved in a round of fighting.’
The report quoted a pair of top-secret Shin Bet documents saying concessions from Israel toward Gaza ‘will enable the preservation of public order for a protracted period.’
The security agency confirmed the accuracy of the quotes, but said they omitted ‘a clear statement by the head of the Shin Bet that ‘high alert must be maintained for a round of fighting amid an emergency on the Gaza front.’
Ynet cited top security officials Friday as being horrified that ‘elements within the Prime Minister’s Office were allegedly leaking classified documents in order to absolve the political echelon of responsibility for October 7 and pin the blame exclusively on the defense establishment.
Yisrael Beytenu MK Avigdor Lieberman — who as defense minister in 2016 warned of a large-scale Hamas attack and ultimately resigned citing insufficiently tough Gaza policies — said on X Friday that the ‘blame game in wartime, between the Shin Bet chief and the prime minister, is a reminder that all those involved in and responsible for the October 7 failure have to go home.’
Labor MK Naama Lazimi said the Ynet report demonstrated why Netanyahu is unwilling to set up a state commission of inquiry for the failure to avoid the shock assault.
Amid Netanyahu’s refusal, anti-government groups and October 7 survivors have established an independent civilian commission of inquiry.
Speaking to that commission on Thursday, Lapid said Netanyahu had been warned several times before October 7 that his government’s policies had eroded Israeli deterrence.
Lapid told the commission that when he met Bar, the Shin Bet chief warned of the ‘defense consequences of the overhaul and the internal schism it is causing.’
The two met the night before the Knesset passed a law gutting the ‘reasonability clause’ that courts employ to nullify what they consider legislative overreach. The move was a key promise of the government’s proposed judicial overhaul to limit courts’ independence, which led to mass anti-government demonstrations in the months before October 7.
Lapid said Friday that the Ynet report was ‘accurate.’