Bar sues Netanyahu for libel as the October 7 record becomes the campaign

Ronen Bar filed a defamation suit against Benjamin Netanyahu at the Central District Court on the morning of Wednesday 14 October, targeting a post the prime minister published on X on 28 September accusing the former Shin Bet director of concealing intelligence received before 7 October 2023. The filing, reported independently by Haaretz and Israel Hayom, sets out at least 20 warnings Bar says he delivered on the Gaza security situation — Israel Hayom describes near-weekly warnings in the months before the attack, focused on Gaza and the High Holy Days — states that the Shin Bet did transmit intelligence to the Prime Minister’s Office in the hours before the assault, and points to an alert issued at 3:03 a.m. on 7 October. Haaretz renders the filing’s characterisation of Netanyahu’s accusations as a “fabricated blood libel in an attempt to shift blame for October 7.” Netanyahu answered the same day: “How many lives could we have saved if you had only called in time?”

Two other files run alongside it. Channel 12 reported on Sunday 11 October that police have evidence Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, improperly removed roughly 30 classified records of security discussions from the PMO to shape the post-attack narrative — a claim the Times of Israel itself labelled an “unsourced Channel 12 report.” The firmer element is the transcript aired a day earlier, in which Braverman appears to ask a PMO stenographer to move the timestamp of the first update from then-military secretary Avi Gil on the morning of 7 October from 6:40 a.m. to 6:29 a.m.; Gil has given two interviews saying the stenographer told him of the request. Braverman already faces an indictment on three counts in the classified-documents leak affair. Separately, Netanyahu confirmed on 13 October that Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel secretly flew to Israel before the attack — after which Kan reported that two businessmen, not Kamel, were aboard the aircraft that landed eleven days earlier.

The arithmetic the litigation is aimed at was published on Wednesday night. Channel 13’s weekly poll, conducted by Madad with Shmuel Rosner and Noah Slepkov among 1,018 respondents with a 3.1 percent margin of error, put the Netanyahu bloc at 51 seats, down four on the week, against 50 for the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot — whose Yashar leads the field on 20 seats, ahead of Likud’s 18. Nineteen seats, roughly 15 percent of the Knesset, sit with parties aligned to neither side. The Hendel–Zelekha alliance of former minister Yoaz Hendel and the economist Yaron Zelekha clears the threshold with four seats for a second consecutive week, having crossed it in this series for the first time only last week.

Assessment: A filing is not a finding. Bar’s 20 warnings are allegations made by a man with a reputation to retrieve, and Netanyahu’s reply is a man with a government to retain; neither is evidence of what reached whom. What the suit does change is procedure — defamation litigation can pull documents into a courtroom that no state commission has yet been empowered to demand, which is why the opposition’s answer to it was to renew the demand for one. Watch the Kamel story as the control case: a prime ministerial confirmation on Tuesday, a broadcaster’s contradiction by Wednesday. With both blocs short of 61, this is a fight over the unaligned nineteen.