Israel’s Shin Bet says Netanyahu policies helped pave way for 7 October

Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, has said Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies were among the underlying causes of the 7 October 2023 attack in which Hamas and other militants killed about 1,200 Israelis.

In its report on the 7 October attack, Shin Bet acknowledged its own responsibility, admitting it was aware of warning signs that Hamas was planning an operation, but the agency, also known as the General Security Service (GSS), did not grasp the scale, timing and location of the planned attack.

However, the report also argued that a string of Israeli government policies helped pave the way for the Hamas assault.

Among the main reasons for a Hamas military build-up before the attacks, an eight-page public summary of the report listed an Israeli “policy of quiet” towards the group, apparently referring to a policy of restraint in the use of force to keep Hamas’s military capability in check. It also listed Netanyahu’s acquiescence in the flow of funds from Qatar to Gaza, a policy designed to divide Palestinians by boosting Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian state.

The Shin Bet report also pointed to the daily Jewish prayers that have been taking place in recent years in the compound around Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, known to Jews as the Temple Mount. The prayers violate a 58-year-old understanding with Jordan that only Muslims should be allowed to pray at the al-Aqsa and the esplanade around it, but they were championed by the governing coalition’s former national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

“The cumulative weight of violations on the Temple Mount, the treatment of [Palestinian] prisoners and the perception that Israeli society had been weakened because of the damage to social cohesion” were all contributory factors to Israel’s vulnerability to attack, the report said.

Shin Bet argued that it had not underestimated Hamas and its desire to mount a major attack from Gaza by overwhelming Israeli fortifications around the coastal strip. The security agency said it even gave the plan the code name of Walls of Jericho, but it did not lead to heightened security.

“The plans were not viewed as a relatable threat, and the series of weak indicative signs that began in the summer of 2023 were not attributed to that threat,” the report said, adding that a Hamas insurgency in the West Bank was seen as more likely at the time.

“That led to the mortal flaw in the decision-making on the night between 6 and 7 October,” the report said.

The night before the massacre, Shin Bet raised an alert over the activation of 45 Israeli sim cards by Hamas militants. The agency labelled the sim activation as unusual and a possible pointer to an impending attack, if other indicative signs emerged. The fact that no defensive preparations were taken, the Shin Bet report blamed in part on lack of cooperation with army intelligence.

In response to the report, sources described as close to Netanyahu briefed Israeli reporters against the head of Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, whom the prime minister has been trying to remove.

Bar, the Netanyahu associates were quoted as saying, “failed completely” in dealing with the Hamas threat and had been a “slave to preconceptions” about the militant group.

Netanyahu recently removed Bar and the Mossad chief, David Barnea, from Israel’s delegation to ceasefire talks in Doha and Cairo, in what was widely seen by Israeli political observers as a reflection of the rift between the prime minister and the security agencies over the conduct of the war, and whether it should proceed with a second phase of the ceasefire.

The internal friction comes amid a regional struggle to define Gaza’s postwar future, which was heightened by Donald Trump’s shock declaration last month that the US would take on ownership of the occupied territory, which would be emptied of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents and turned into a “Riviera of the Middle East”.

At a summit in Cairo on Tuesday, the Arab League endorsed an Egyptian-drafted alternative plan, in which the reconstruction of Gaza would take place under a technocratic committee of Palestinians, in place of Hamas.

An Arab diplomat on Wednesday said the initial feedback from Washington to the plan had been “disappointingly negative”. “They still prefer Trump’s plan,” the diplomat said, noting that the administration has so far not presented a blueprint for how Trump’s vision of US control of Gaza and the construction of luxury resorts would be implemented.

A delegation of Arab foreign ministers is planning to go to Washington later this month to lobby Trump officials in favour of the Egyptian postwar plan.