Ex-Shin Bet chief takes Netanyahu to court over October 7, eleven days before voting

Former Shin Bet director Ronen Bar filed a defamation suit against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday 14 October, seeking 3 million shekels — roughly $970,000, per Al-Monitor — over a post Netanyahu published on X on 28 September that accused Bar of concealing intelligence before the 7 October 2023 attack and attributed “failures and criminal offenses” to him. Haaretz reports the filing sets out at least 20 warnings delivered to the prime minister’s office about Gaza’s deteriorating security picture, and submits that the service passed intelligence to the PMO in the hours before the attack; Israel Hayom’s account specifies an alert issued at 3:03 a.m. Bar’s pleading calls the accusations 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?”

The filing is confirmed across the Israeli spectrum; its contents are not findings but a plaintiff’s claims, untested by any court, and the outlets cannot agree on the venue — Israel Hayom places the suit in the Central District Court, Al-Monitor in Tel Aviv. The parallel thread is weaker still. The Wall Street Journal reported that Egypt’s then-intelligence chief Abbas Kamel telephoned Netanyahu days before the attack; Netanyahu denied it in the 28 September post now under suit; in a 13 October interview with the pro-government Channel 14 he said Kamel had been in Israel but did not meet him, which Haaretz framed as an admission that Kamel landed. The Times of Israel then noted that multiple reports say Kamel was not aboard the Egyptian jet that arrived on 26 September 2023, and headlined its 15 October analysis on the warnings reporting as “tenuous, but still dangerous for Netanyahu.”

Assessment: Two separate things are being conflated in the coverage. One is a libel action with a documentary annex, which will move on court time and produce nothing testable before 27 October. The other is a chain of warning claims contested at every link — the call, the visit, the manifest — where each denial generates a fresh news cycle regardless of what is established. Treat the Kamel thread as claim versus claim. Note also the two unattributed Times of Israel liveblog items of 15 October, on targeting decisions and a Mossad-arranged Qatari meeting: originating outlets unidentified, PMO declining comment. Those are leads, not findings. The electoral utility of an untested pleading is precisely that it cannot be resolved in time.