Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Tuesday issued a scathing attack on Shin Bet security agency head Ronen Bar, charging that the findings of the internal probe Bar ordered into the agency’s failure to prevent Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught “don’t answer any question.”

The Shin Bet findings, while detailing failures and saying it could have foiled the attack had it acted differently, largely point the blame outwards, including hinting that successive governments took insufficiently offensive policies regarding Hamas, including avoiding targeting the terror group’s leaders as the agency allegedly advocated.

On the morning of October 7, some 5,000 Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.

“The conclusions of the Shin Bet probe don’t match the gravity of the immense failure of the agency and its head,” said a statement attributed to Netanyahu’s “circle.”

The statement claimed Bar “completely failed” to counter the Hamas threat in general and on October 7, “misread the intelligence picture” and had a misconception regarding the level of threat it posed, arguing that the Shin Bet had contended right up to the invasion that the terror group wanted to keep the quiet.

It further contended that on October 1, Bar recommended civilian concessions to Hamas in exchange for quiet, and cautioned against targeting Hamas’s leaders. It added that in an October 3 document, Bar wrote that Hamas sought to avoid a round of fighting against Israel and saw a potential for stability if Gaza was given a positive economic horizon.

It said the Shin Bet didn’t mention or deal with Hamas’s “Jericho Walls” plan, “even though the Shin Bet knew about the plan since 2018,” and accused Bar of not waking Netanyahu up on the night of October 6-7, “the most basic and natural decision........

© The Times of Israel