Three years after the morning Hamas fighters broke through the fence between Gaza and Israel, the argument over who failed to stop them has narrowed to two small things: a telephone number, and the time printed beside a phone call. On Wednesday, 14 October, that argument reached a courtroom. Ronen Bar, who ran the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, on the day of the attack, sued Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for defamation, as AFP reported in a dispatch carried by Al Jazeera.
The document runs to 134 pages. It asks for three million shekels, about $968,500. According to Israeli coverage of the filing, it was lodged that morning at the Central District Court. Israelis vote on 27 October, in a race the polls call close and in which Netanyahu, as rews has reported, is running on security.
The charge
Bar’s complaint is about words. Netanyahu had accused him of “criminal failures” over the attack and has said the Shin Bet chief never warned him that morning. In the prime minister’s version, he could have stopped the assault if Bar or the generals had called to wake him. Bar’s lawyers call this slander. The suit says Netanyahu was “lying to cover himself”, and that he made accusations “that he knew to be false, with the aim of diverting the debate from his own responsibility for the events of October 7”.
Bar’s own account of that dawn is plain. When signs of a possible attack appeared, he says, he phoned the prime minister’s military secretary. He did not have Netanyahu’s direct number.
The suit also looks further back than that morning. It argues that Netanyahu’s policies over several years had “increased the dangers posed by terrorist organisations in Gaza”. Israel Hayom and other Israeli outlets report that the filing lists at least 20 warnings about Gaza, including what Bar calls two “dramatic series” of them in April and July 2023. It accuses the government of a years-long policy of “quiet at any cost” and asks the court to order disclosure of intelligence assessments from the months before the massacre. Those reports also say Bar does not deny his own part. “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,” he is quoted as saying. His quarrel is with having the prime minister’s share loaded onto him as well.
The red line
The answer came the same day, in a statement from Netanyahu’s Likud party.
“Ronen, are you serious? You had my number on the red line and could have called me immediately, as all security chiefs do. How many lives could we have saved if only you had called in time?”
So the dispute stands like this. One man says he called the office as he was supposed to. The other says he should have been called directly. Both have spent more than three years insisting the other is to blame for a morning on which, by Israeli official figures, at least 1,221 people were killed and 251 were taken into Gaza, among them the bodies of 44 people killed that day. Bar left the Shin Bet in June 2025 amid those recriminations. He maintained throughout that he had warned Netanyahu of the threat beforehand. About two weeks before filing, he announced he would sue, after the prime minister accused him of knowing of the danger that night and keeping it to himself.
Eleven minutes
The clock is the second part of the story. On 8 October, Maj. Gen. Avi Gil, Netanyahu’s military secretary from July 2021 to May 2024, told Channel 12 that the prime minister’s office had “falsified records related to October 7, 2023”.
Gil said a stenographer in the office came to him in January 2024. She had been instructed by Netanyahu’s chief of staff to change the logged time of a four-minute call from 6:40am to 6:29am. Hamas began its attack at 6:29. According to The Times of Israel, the call Gil described was the one in which he told Netanyahu the country was at war, and he named the chief of staff as Tzachi Braverman. “She told me, I’m not allowed to change it,” Gil recalled. “Those are facts, and there is no dispute about them.”
Moving a call eleven minutes earlier puts the prime minister’s first knowledge of the war at the moment the war began, and so pushes any earlier delay onto someone else. That is a reading of the arithmetic. Gil himself went only as far as saying it was “possible” the change was meant to support a claim that security chiefs had known in advance and kept quiet. Netanyahu’s office and Likud have rejected the allegation. Ynet reports that police investigated Braverman on suspicion of falsifying official records, and that prosecutors are not expected to decide on charges before the election.
Cairo’s warning
There is one more voice, from outside Israel. Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, warned Netanyahu himself. Kamel reportedly phoned the prime minister in a rare call just days before the attack, after he is said to have flown to Israel in September 2023 to warn security officials in person that Hamas was planning something.
Here is a reflection, not a finding: governments that cannot agree on what happened sooner or later fight over the paperwork. In Jerusalem the questions are now which number was dialled, which line was red and which minute went into the log. A court and a police file are working through them while the campaign goes on, and Bar’s suit is the latest of many attacks on the prime minister from former staff, officials and the opposition over the bloodshed.
Gaza does not appear in any of these logs. In the three years since that morning, Israel has killed more than 74,300 people there, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry. More than 1,400 of them have been killed since a tentative US-backed ceasefire was reached last year. No one in Jerusalem is suing over those numbers.