‘Lives could’ve been saved’: Netanyahu slams fmr Shin Bet chief after defamation suit over Oct 7 claims

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar continued their ongoing public dispute on Wednesday, with Netanyahu hitting back after Bar filed a NIS 3 million ($970,000) defamation suit laying out his version of events on Oct. 7, 2023.

The suit alleges that Netanyahu lied when he recently claimed Bar knew that Hamas was about to attack Israel on the night of Oct. 7, but failed to inform him in time.

Following the filing, Netanyahu attacked Bar, saying that the one who “saw the warning signs on the night of October 7 and didn’t call me, is saying today that he didn’t have my phone number.”

Ronen, are you serious? You had my secure phone number, and you could have immediately called me, as all heads of the security establishment do. The Shin Bet security guards, your subordinates, who are with me 24/7, could have reached me within minutes. How many lives could we have saved if you had only called in time?” he wrote on 𝕏.

The dispute is part of a long-running feud between the two leaders, which culminated in Netanyahu firing Bar in May 2025. However, the High Court issued an injunction blocking the dismissal and later ruled it unlawful. Bar resigned in the end.

An associate of Bar told Ynet News, “If the prime minister is serious, he should waive his immunity, face the allegations and provide explanations for the policies he established, the communication procedures he put in place, which the military secretary described, and the recommendations to eliminate senior Hamas officials that he never acted upon.”

The latest exchange reflects the broader discussion over responsibility for the failures that led to the Oct. 7 invasion and terror attack. Netanyahu has largely blamed the defense establishment, while acknowledging only limited responsibility himself.

Security chiefs and opposition leaders, meanwhile, have blamed Netanyahu while demanding a state commission of inquiry to investigate the matter, which the prime minister has rejected.

Last April, Netanyahu submitted a responding affidavit to the High Court after Bar had outlined his account of the events in an earlier affidavit.

“Bar’s claim that he warned of war and alerted the entire system is false. He did not alert the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, the emergency squads and security coordinators in the kibbutzim, nor did he order the evacuation and closure of the Nova party,” Netanyahu wrote at the time.

Netanyahu has since repeated these claims. Last month, he said, “There was a major failure, and it is reflected in what happened the night and morning before the attack, that there were all the signs and they decided, due to a ‘miscalculation,’ not to upset Hamas, not to wake me up and not to attack in advance – it was a failure, but not betrayal.”

In a more recent post on Sept. 28, Netanyahu wrote that in the early morning of Oct. 7, 2023, Bar “held numerous conversations with then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi and military intelligence chief Aharon Haliva, during which they discussed all the warning signs. Despite this, Ronen Bar decided not to call and update the prime minister, not to alert the civilian security squads or IDF forces on the ground, not to evacuate the Nova music festival — and instead to dispatch only a small Tequila team (which proves he knew there was a real threat).”

This triggered Bar’s defamation lawsuit, which he argues “completely demolishes the prime minister’s assertions and sheds light on an extraordinary series of warnings of an impending disaster, recommendations and operational plans that I presented on dozens of occasions, all of which were met with disregard by Netanyahu. The statement of claim clearly outlines the prime minister’s responsibility for the policy of containment, maintaining calm and financing Hamas’s military buildup.”

Bar explained that beginning at 11 p.m. on Oct. 6, Shin Bet officials were updating IDF counterparts about suspicious developments in the Gaza Strip. Around 2 a.m., the head of Shin Bet operations activated the agency’s elite Tequila counter-terrorism commando unit.

The agency also sent out an electronic alert pointing to possible signs of an attack by Hamas at 3:03 a.m., Bar said. He acknowledged that the warning should have been stronger but argued that “no one, including the Shin Bet, estimated that Hamas was heading toward an all-out attack.”

Between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., Bar deployed the Tequila unit to the northern Gaza border and instructed officials to send the main points of a situational assessment to Netanyahu’s military secretary. Although the secretary’s team had received updates throughout the night, it did not decide to wake the prime minister. At the time, IDF Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Avi Gil was responsible for waking Netanyahu.

Bar then noted that his chief of staff held a situational assessment with Gil by phone at 6:15 a.m., but Hamas began the invasion shortly after, while Gil and the IDF chief of staff’s bureau chief were still on the phone.

“Although the defendant [Netanyahu] is fully aware of all the above,” Bar argued in the suit, “he chose… to level a particularly grave and malicious, yet baseless, accusation against the plaintiff, portraying him as a ‘criminal’ who knowingly chose to withhold information from the defendant and the security agencies.”