Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday again denied receiving an advance warning from Egypt before the October 7 Hamas attack, then launched a fierce attack on former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, accusing him of “failures and crimes” and claiming he knew there was a “real danger” in the hours before the assault.
The statement came after The Wall Street Journal reported that Egypt had conveyed several warnings to Israel before October 7, including through then-Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel. Netanyahu’s office has denied that he met or spoke with Kamel in the months before the attack and denied receiving such an Egyptian warning.
Ronen Bar, Benjamin Netanyahu
(Photo: Yair Sagi, Alex Kolomoisky)
“In the months preceding October 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu neither met nor spoke with Abbas Kamel, who at the time headed Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, and no Israeli intelligence official conveyed an Egyptian warning to the prime minister,” Netanyahu wrote on X. He said he had instructed his lawyers to file a defamation suit over the report.
“Furthermore, it is important to clarify: Prime Minister Netanyahu never meets or speaks with the intelligence chief of a foreign country without their Israeli counterparts,” the post said.
Netanyahu then turned his criticism toward Bar, who headed the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, at the time of the attack.
“In recent weeks, the left-wing media has been conducting a vicious and false campaign designed to place all of Ronen Bar’s failures and crimes on the eve of October 7 on Prime Minister Netanyahu,” he wrote. “On the night of October 7, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar held numerous conversations with then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi and Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva, in which they discussed all the warning signs.”
Netanyahu continued: “Despite this, Ronen Bar decided not to call and update the prime minister, not to alert the local security teams and IDF forces in the field, not to evacuate the Nova festival, and only to send a small Tequila team, which proves that he knew there was a real danger.”
The claim that Bar knowingly failed to alert Netanyahu is Netanyahu’s accusation. Separate reporting about the hours before the attack has described disagreements over when and how the prime minister was to be informed, while recent reports have also said Bar had warned Netanyahu of the possibility of a major Hamas escalation in the period before October 7.
Netanyahu also alleged that “Arab countries and other hostile foreign states and actors” were behind what he called false accusations against him, saying their aim was “to bring down Netanyahu’s right-wing government and replace it with a government of the left and Arab parties.”
The latest exchange comes amid renewed scrutiny of what Israel’s political and security leadership knew before the October 7, 2023 attack. Netanyahu has repeatedly denied recent reports that foreign leaders or intelligence officials warned him personally of an impending Hamas assault.