Netanyahu has hitherto refrained from directly peddling unfounded claims about Oct. 7
ed note–for a primer on all of this, please see the ed note commentary here.
And adding to this, we here at this humble little informational endeavor have the following to say–
The only reason, ONLY, that Netanyahu has been afforded the opportunity of putting forth this ‘conspiracy theory’ concerning Ronen Bar’s foreknowledge of the attacks of Oct. 7th is because when the ‘Free Palestine’ movement had the chance to raise this same theory but to attach it to the only person where such a theory made sense, i.e. to Netanyahu himself, they refused to do it and instead swallowed the bait left for them that ‘Israel was taken by surprise’ and ‘bested’ by a group of 3rd world freedom fighters, when common sense and established history were both screaming out to them how unlikely a scenario as this was.
Times of Israel
As the cabinet voted to fire Shin Bet head Ronen Bar, an ‘Israeli official’ late Thursday accused the spy chief of doing nothing to stop the Hamas October 7, 2023, attack even though, the official claimed without evidence, Bar knew that it was going to happen beforehand.
‘Ronen Bar preferred not to attend the government meeting [tonight] dealing with his case, simply because he was afraid of giving answers,’ asserted the ‘official’, whom Channel 12 has now identified as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, ‘and especially of answering one question: ‘Why, after you knew about the Hamas attack many hours before it happened, did you do nothing and did not call the prime minister — something that would have prevented the disaster?’
‘If Ronen Bar carried out his role like he is now clinging on to his job, we would not have reached October 7,’ the ‘official’ charged.
Netanyahu has sought to shift the responsibility for the colossal failure onto the shoulders of the security establishment, arguing that he was not woken up in the hours before the invasion when signs of the 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. Netanyahu had for years placated the terror group by sending Qatari funds into Gaza, issuing work permits for Gazans, and ordering only limited military responses to attacks.
In their probes into the Hamas invasion, both the IDF and Shin Bet have acknowledged ‘colossal failures’ surrounding October 7. The IDF’s investigations have established that it identified several signs of unusual Hamas activity the night before the terror group’s October 7 onslaught, but believed they did not indicate an ‘imminent’ attack.
The Shin Bet’s probe, only 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 allegation that the military and/or security agencies had advance knowledge of the Hamas attack and deliberately ignored it, thus facilitating the Hamas massacre, has been peddled online by pro-Netanyahu conspiracy theorists since soon after October 7, but not hitherto directly advanced by the prime minister himself.
The fiery statement against Bar came after the Shin Bet leader, in a letter sent to the cabinet earlier Thursday, accused Netanyahu of harming Israel’s security and getting in the way of negotiations to reach a hostage release deal, and linked his ouster to the ‘ongoing complex, extensive, and highly sensitive investigation currently underway into Qatar’s involvement in the heart of Israeli decision-making, the Prime Minister’s Office.’