Former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Ronen Bar filed an NIS 3 million defamation lawsuit against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Central District Court in Lod on Wednesday, alleging that the prime minister knowingly published false accusations about his conduct before the October 7 attack to shift responsibility onto him.
The lawsuit, filed less than two weeks before the October 27 elections, centers on a September 28 post on Netanyahu’s personal X/Twitter account accusing Bar of “failures and crimes.” Alongside compensation, Bar seeks a court-ordered correction or denial and legal costs, and says he will seek disclosure of relevant documents held by Netanyahu.
The lawsuit made serious allegations about what Netanyahu knew and how he acted in the years, months and hours preceding the attack. The court has not ruled on these allegations.
In the September 28 X post, Netanyahu accused Bar of recognizing warning signs but deciding not to call and alert him. Bar rejected that accusation, saying that the Shin Bet shared the available intelligence with Netanyahu’s military secretariat and that he instructed his staff to update the military secretariat before the attack began.
The lawsuit argues that the military secretariat was the official channel for updating Netanyahu and deciding whether to wake him. Bar also states that Netanyahu had not given him his personal phone number.
Responding Wednesday, Netanyahu dismissed that explanation, saying Bar could have reached him through other channels.
“Ronen, are you serious?” Netanyahu wrote on Telegram. “You had my secure phone number and could have called me immediately, as all the heads of the security establishment do.”
Netanyahu added that his Shin Bet guards, whom he described as Bar’s subordinates, could have reached him within minutes. “How many lives we could have saved if only you had called in time,” he wrote.
The distinction between information reaching the Prime Minister’s Office and reaching Netanyahu personally is central to the dispute.
The lawsuit emphasizes that Bar is not trying to evade responsibility for the Shin Bet’s intelligence failure, but is rather challenging accusations that he knowingly withheld information and chose not to take action to save lives.
“As the head of the service, I bear responsibility for the Shin Bet’s failure to provide the intelligence required regarding the October 7 attack and its timing,” Bar said in a statement issued on his behalf.
“Accordingly, I resigned from my position, bowing my head before the bereaved families.”
Lawsuit contradicts Netanyahu claims that Shin Bet concealed evidence
Bar’s departure followed a prolonged confrontation with Netanyahu over his dismissal and the agency’s independence. The government voted on March 20, 2025, to end his tenure, citing a breakdown in professional trust. Netanyahu maintained that the loss of trust stemmed from October 7; Bar argued that the move followed his resistance to improper demands and investigations involving people close to the prime minister.
The High Court of Justice froze the dismissal while considering petitions against it. On April 28, Bar announced that he would leave on June 15, and the government rescinded its dismissal decision the following day.
On May 21, the court nevertheless ruled, by a majority, that the dismissal decision had been unlawful. It found that Netanyahu had acted under a conflict of interest arising from investigations involving his associates, and that the government had bypassed the required advisory process, lacked an adequate factual basis, and failed to give Bar a proper opportunity to answer the allegations against him.
The investigations at the center of the conflict included “Qatargate”, which examined suspicions that figures close to Netanyahu promoted Qatari interests while working around the prime minister during the war. Qatar’s role as a mediator in hostage negotiations made the alleged relationships particularly sensitive. A separate investigation concerned the unauthorized transfer of classified military material to the German newspaper Bild.
In his April 2025 affidavit opposing his dismissal, Bar argued that the investigations posed a threat to Netanyahu’s personal and political interests. He also alleged that Netanyahu sought to use the Shin Bet’s powers against anti-government protesters. Netanyahu rejected Bar’s account and denied requesting unlawful surveillance of protest leaders.
The new lawsuit returns to those allegations, linking the attacks on Bar to his affidavit and describing the alleged efforts to deploy the agency against political protests as an attempt to use it as a “secret police” force.
During the dismissal proceedings, bereaved relatives also demanded accountability from Bar. At the April 8 hearing, bereaved father Itzik Bonzel, now a Likud candidate, challenged the court’s intervention, arguing that Bar’s acknowledged responsibility for the failure meant he should leave office.
The lawsuit details how, in the months leading up to October 7, Bar says he repeatedly warned Netanyahu about the possibility of escalation on multiple fronts, including Gaza, with particular concern ahead of the High Holy Days. He also presented proposals to target senior Hamas officials, which he says Netanyahu rejected or failed to advance.
Bar demands full disclosure of documents
Among the examples is a July 23, 2023, conversation in which Bar says he told Netanyahu: “I am giving you a strategic warning of war.” According to the filing, he also explicitly cautioned that the agency would not be able to provide a precise day and hour.
These were warnings of a deteriorating security situation, rather than intelligence identifying the date, scale, or operational plan of the October 7 attack; the lawsuit expressly acknowledges that the Shin Bet failed to identify those in advance.
The filing further alleges that Netanyahu pursued a policy of “quiet at any cost” in Gaza, directing the security establishment to postpone confrontations, keep Gaza as a secondary arena, and preserve Hamas as the governing authority.
Bar argues that this policy constrained offensive action against Hamas and allowed it to strengthen. He alleges that Netanyahu continued permitting Qatari money into Gaza despite warnings that funds were reaching Hamas’s military wing.
Netanyahu has presented a competing account, citing excerpts from security discussions and intelligence assessments to argue that Bar supported economic concessions and restraint toward Gaza and failed to warn him of an impending attack. In his April 2025 affidavit, Netanyahu cited a Shin Bet assessment from days before the massacre that suggested renewed understandings with Hamas could help preserve stability.
Bar argues that selected quotations obscure the broader record of his warnings and recommendations. His lawsuit also acknowledges that Netanyahu sometimes approved preparations for targeted killings in principle, including at an October 1, 2023, discussion, but alleges that he failed to issue the instructions needed to advance them.
Regarding the night of October 7, the lawsuit disputes Netanyahu’s claim that Bar held numerous conversations with then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi and then-military intelligence chief Aharon Haliva before deciding not to alert the prime minister. Bar says he did not speak to either man that night, although officials in their organizations exchanged information.
According to the lawsuit, Shin Bet personnel began updating their military counterparts at about 11 p.m. on October 6 and distributed an electronic alert at 3:03 a.m. concerning an unusual accumulation of possible indications of offensive Hamas activity.
The lawsuit acknowledged that the alert was assigned a lower level of urgency than it should have been. It also states that the Shin Bet did not anticipate a full-scale attack that night.
Bar said the intelligence officer in the prime minister’s military secretariat received updates overnight, including a follow-up call at 3:55 a.m. that drew attention to information already sent. He further says that, after an assessment ending around 5:15 a.m., he instructed his staff to update Netanyahu’s military secretary, Avi Gil, before the attack began.
The filing placed the subsequent call from Bar’s chief of staff to Gil at 6:15 a.m., while quoting Gil’s account that he was awakened at 6:12 a.m. Neither account establishes that Netanyahu himself received the information at those times.
The lawsuit also challenged Netanyahu’s accusations that Bar failed to alert local emergency response squads or evacuate the Nova music festival. Bar says he did not know the festival was taking place, and argues that the Shin Bet did not command the IDF or the local squads and was not responsible for licensing civilian events.
He further disputes Netanyahu’s argument that dispatching a small “Tequila” operational team demonstrated advance knowledge of the impending massacre. The lawsuit says such teams were regularly mobilized in response to possible attacks and that sending one did not mean the agency anticipated an assault on the scale of October 7.
The dispute has increasingly focused on access to the full documentary record. Netanyahu has released selected excerpts from security discussions, including in a 55-page account published in February as part of his response to the state comptroller. Bar alleges that the presentation omits context necessary to assess what was recommended and decided.
Separately, Gil has alleged that Netanyahu’s former chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, sought to change the recorded time of a call on the morning of October 7. Braverman has denied wrongdoing. The allegation of altering a record is distinct from the dispute over selectively publishing excerpts.
On Tuesday, dozens of former hostages, bereaved relatives and other family members demanded that Netanyahu release the full protocols, original recordings and logs from security discussions before and on the morning of the attack, subject to military censorship and the law. Signatories included former hostages Yocheved Lifshitz and Ditza Heiman; Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan was abducted on October 7; and Hadas Kalderon, whose children Sahar and Erez and their father Ofer were also taken hostage.
Bar said he had waited three years for a state commission of inquiry to examine the Shin Bet’s actions alongside its failures, but had decided to sue in light of what he described as an ongoing campaign against him.
The filing argues that Netanyahu should not be protected by parliamentary immunity because, in Bar’s account, the publication was a planned personal and political attack rather than protected conduct in the performance of his duties.
“I call on the prime minister not to hide behind claims of immunity,” Bar said. “In the absence of a state commission of inquiry, the truth will be established in court.”