Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is continuing his campaign to place responsibility for the failures surrounding the October 7 massacre on the security establishment, and on the Shin Bet in particular. Late Sunday, days after publishing his ‘responses document’ to State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, in which he accused senior security officials of adhering to a pre-massacre concept that Hamas was deterred, Netanyahu took the unprecedented step of sharing a claim alleging that the top echelon of the security establishment effectively led a ‘rebellion’ against him, one that supposedly resulted in the massacre.
In a post he shared on social media, Netanyahu quoted claims made by commentator Erez Tadmor, one of the founders of the Im Tirtzu movement. Tadmor previously ran in Likud primaries and, more than a decade ago, also served as a speechwriter for Netanyahu. The post stated: “A summary of Shin Bet discussions on the night of the massacre shows that the ‘professional’ consideration that guided Ronen Bar’s decision-making on the night of the disaster was the prevention of a ‘miscalculation.’ In the background also hovers a 2019 article by intelligence research chief Amit Sa’ar, according to which Operation Protective Edge was the result of a miscalculation for which Netanyahu was primarily responsible. The unavoidable conclusion is that Ronen Bar decided Benjamin Netanyahu was an illegitimate prime minister who had already entangled Israel in an unnecessary war in 2014, and therefore, in order to prevent him from leading another miscalculation, chose to appoint himself de facto prime minister on the night of the massacre.”
In Netanyahu’s post, quoting Tadmor, it was further written: “After the decisions he made led to the greatest disaster in the history of the state, Bar understood that the only thing more severe than the reckless decisions themselves was that they were made as part of a rebellion against the prime minister, and he decided to falsify the Shin Bet investigation. The Shin Bet leadership in particular, and the security establishment leadership in general, was infected with an anti-democratic virus, as if Netanyahu were a reckless prime minister and their role as ‘gatekeepers’ was to protect the State of Israel from the prime minister. After the rebellion they led ended in the most horrific disaster in the history of the state, they added sin to crime and launched a campaign of cover-up, forgery and rewriting of history.”
Amit Sa’ar, whose ‘article’ was mentioned in the claim circulated by the prime minister, died earlier this year after battling cancer and, of course, cannot respond to the allegations. Netanyahu, it should be noted, published a condolence message last month following Sa’ar’s death. “My wife Sara and I share in the deep sorrow of the Sa’ar family over the untimely passing of Brig. Gen. Amit Sa’ar, who served as head of the IDF Intelligence Directorate’s research division and took part in the most sensitive security discussions at the start of the war until he fell ill,” the statement said. “Amit contributed decades to Israel’s security and was an upright and devoted officer who knew how to express his position without fear, clearly and articulately.” Sa’ar was head of the research division on October 7 and retired from the IDF in April 2024 after a malignant tumor was discovered in his body. He stressed that his retirement was due to his medical condition. On January 1 of this year, at the age of 47, he died.
This is not the first time Netanyahu has accused the former Shin Bet chief of falsifying records. During a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week, Netanyahu claimed that Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar had ‘tampered with’ the document summarizing the discussions held on the night between October 6 and 7. He alleged that the document the Shin Bet distributed as a real-time summary of the night’s events did not include a clause calling for updating the political leadership. Netanyahu also said the original document was circulated only at 9:47 a.m., and claimed that in a version distributed during the war, amid the controversy over Bar’s dismissal and the Shin Bet’s investigation into the massacre, a clause was added instructing that the prime minister be updated. “This dropped the state comptroller’s jaw,” Netanyahu said.
Last Thursday, Netanyahu published his responses to State Comptroller Englman regarding the failures of October 7 late at night, perhaps assuming many would lack the patience to delve into them. Across 55 pages, some of them redacted, he sought to present a softened and self-protective version of the events surrounding the massacre and what led up to it, a move that drew sharp criticism from within the security establishment.
The document includes selective quotations from protocols, situation assessments and intelligence documents. It suffers from pronounced one-sidedness, deliberate omissions and a clear focus on blaming the security establishment. A senior IDF officer who was a dominant figure around the events of October 7 read the document and was stunned. “We have a pathologically lying prime minister,” the officer said over the weekend. “This document is deception and forgery, built on half-truths and piles of concealment. It is sad.”
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Netanyahu’s note versus his responses to the state comptroller. In his handwriting: “Gaza, stability through strength.”
On Sunday, Ronen Bergman and Yuval Rubovitz revealed in ynet a handwritten note Netanyahu wrote during a Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee discussion on June 13, 2023, less than four months before Hamas’ surprise attack. The note, which was thrown into the trash after the discussion, sharply contradicts several of Netanyahu’s claims regarding responsibility for the October 7 failure. For example, the state comptroller asked Netanyahu, according to the prime minister’s published responses: “Did the directive stating that Hamas was deterred and interested in quiet affect the handling of border defense in the Gaza Strip?” Netanyahu replied: “The statement that ‘Hamas is deterred’ was not a ‘directive.’” However, Netanyahu’s own handwriting on the note bears the heading he denied before the comptroller: “Directive.”
Netanyahu told Englman that it was not he who spoke of Hamas being deterred, but rather “the unified intelligence assessment supported by all Israeli intelligence bodies.” In Netanyahu’s handwritten note, by contrast, he explicitly instructs the security and intelligence agencies: “Gaza, stability through strength.”