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| Ronen Bar Shin Bet Head |
The IDF was shocked by part of the Shin Bet report published on Tuesday that revealed an exceptional operational incident that according to them, was completely unknown to them, Army Radio reported.
The Shin Bet’s internal report on its failure to predict or prevent the October 7 massacre stated that in the days following the massacre, “The Shin Bet sent a dedicated force to the north in preparation for a possible Radwan Force infiltration. This force encountered terrorists and Shin Bet personnel were also injured there.”
Senior officials in the IDF and the Northern Command responded to the report by saying: “We are not familiar with this event. The IDF is not aware of any encounter between Hezbollah terrorists and Shin Bet personnel in the first days of the war.”
It should be noted that after the publication of the investigation, the IDF contacted the Shin Bet requesting clarification.
Many media outlets and politicians excoriated the Shin Bet investigation which pointed fingers at other entities and tried to place the blame for the colossal failure on others.
Army Radio military correspondent Doron Kadosh wrote that the “Shin Bet made good use of being a secret organization to publish a document of ‘main points of investigation,’ most of which blames other factors. It is noticeable that an effort was made to extract one bottom line: ‘We failed, but…’ We failed but the political echelon is more to blame because it led a policy of containment towards the Gaza Strip. We failed but the political echelon did not listen to us all these years when we pushed to carry out targeted killings in the Strip.”
Kadosh noted that important details are missing in the report regarding the organization’s conduct on the fateful night of the attack. “If the Shin Bet believed that this was such important information that required a change in preparation – why did its two representatives in the command’s situational assessment not add a single word to the statements of the intelligence officers from the Southern Command and Gaza Division and challenge them even slightly? And why did the Shin Bet refrain from mentioning this?”
In addition, he noted the contradiction between what the Shin Bet claimed were its positions over the years and its actual actions: “How can the unbelievable gap between so many ‘correct’ and ‘sober’ perceptions presented by the Shin Bet and the fact that the organization supported the moves of the political echelon in the Gaza Strip in recent years be explained? [The Shin Bet chief supported civilian measures for the Gaza Strip, supported the ‘understandings’ that were reached shortly before 7/10, and also supported the entry of Gazan workers].”
Kadosh also criticized the fact that the investigation ignores the central issue of the Gazan workers who entered Israel in the years before the massacre: “Did the workers who entered Israel help Hamas and collect intelligence? Did these workers, under the nose, and with the approval of the Shin Bet, become Hamas agents in Israeli territory?”
“After 16 long months of waiting, the Shin Bet, which failed, could have provided the Israeli public with a more incisive, fairer investigation, which takes full accountability, and without ‘but’. Unfortunately, this was not done,” Kadosh emphasized.
The Shin Bet’s report on the October 7 massacre revealed that if the organization had acted differently in the years leading up to the attack and on the night of the attack, both professionally and managerially, the massacre could have been prevented. “This is not the standard we expected of ourselves and the public expected of us,” Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar stated. However, as noted above, he spent much of the report blaming other factors, especially the political echelon.
