Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specifically accused former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar of withholding critical information from him.
By World Israel News Staff
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charged that senior Israeli security officials intentionally failed to wake him as the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion was unfolding because they feared he would order an overwhelming military response against the terrorist organization.
Netanyahu made the bombshell claims in several interviews and video clips posted to his social media accounts in recent days, arguing that he was not responsible for the catastrophic security failures that saw Hamas terrorists murder some 1,200 people and kidnap 251 in Israel.
The October 7 assault began at approximately 6:30 a.m., when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip. In some locations, as the terrorists rampaged through communities and military bases, Israeli civilians and security personnel waited hours for the IDF to arrive.
Netanyahu has previously acknowledged that he was asleep when the attack began and has argued that the course of events could have been different had he been awakened immediately.
Among those he specifically accused of deliberately failing to wake him was former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, whom Netanyahu dismissed earlier this year. Netanyahu alleged that Bar and other senior officials believed Hamas was deterred and opposed launching a decisive military response against the terrorist organization.
According to Netanyahu, those officials also knew that waking him would prompt an aggressive response and therefore deliberately refrained from doing so.
Had security officials awakened Netanyahu upon the onset of the invasion, he would have “woken up all the communities, woken up all the security coordinators and told the air force to be ready to strike and kill anyone approaching the fence,” Netanyahu said in a livestream broadcast to his official Instagram account on Tuesday.
Netanyahu made a similar argument in a separate podcast interview, claiming that senior security officials viewed him as unusually aggressive in responding to terrorist threats.
Netanyahu’s reputation among security officials, he claimed, was that of a “majnun” — an Arabic term for a crazy person, meaning they believed he would respond too aggressively to terrorism.
Netanyahu’s approach toward security, in those officials’ minds, “would cause an attack or exchange of fire with Hamas and that had to be prevented,” the premier claimed.
In a separate clip posted to his social media accounts, Netanyahu maintained that an earlier warning to him would have fundamentally altered Israel’s response.
“If they had woken me, everything would have been different. That’s the story of October 7,” he said.
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