Former Israeli Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar sues Prime Minister Netanyahu for defamation over Oct 7 claims

JERUSALEM - The former head of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency on Oct 14 sued Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for defamation weeks before elections in a row over responsibility for Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.

Netanyahu, who polls show in a tight race to stay in power in the Oct 27 election, has been hammered by the opposition for failing to prevent the attack, the deadliest day in Israeli history.

Netanyahu, who has cast himself as a guarantor of Israel’s security over his decades-long career, has insisted that he could have stopped the attack had the Shin Bet’s then director, Ronen Bar, or military leaders called to wake him up the day of the early-morning attack.

In the 134-page court document, Bar accused Netanyahu of “lying to cover himself” and said it was slanderous to accuse him of “criminal failures” over the attack.

Netanyahu made accusations against Bar “that he knew to be false, with the aim of diverting the debate from his own responsibility for the events of October 7”, the lawsuit said.

Instead it was Netanyahu’s policies over several years that had “increased the dangers posed by terrorist organisations in Gaza”, it said.

Bar resigned in June 2025, saying at the time that “all the systems collapsed” in the security agency and that Shin Bet “failed to sound the alarm”.

But Bar said he was resigning to take responsibility as head of the organisation and insists he did warn Netanyahu before Oct 7 of potential threats linked to Hamas.

Bar is seeking three million shekels (around S$1.2 million) in damages from Netanyahu.

Bar said he telephoned the prime minister’s military secretary as soon as signs of a possible attack came up but that he did not have Netanyahu’s direct number.

“Ronen, are you serious?” Netanyahu responded in a statement issued by his Likud party on Oct 14.

“You had my number on the red line and could have called me immediately, as all security chiefs do.”

“How many lives could we have saved if only you had called in time?” he asked.

Hamas stormed into Israel with pickup trucks and paragliders and opened fire at sites including a music festival. The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally from official Israeli figures, with militants also dragging 251 hostages into Gaza, 44 of them already dead.

Israel responded with a massive offensive into Gaza that has killed more than 74,300 people, according to the territory’s health ministry, which operates under Hamas and whose figures are generally considered reliable by the United Nations. AFP