David Zini, who took over as director of the Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) in October from Ronen Bar, with the media coverage framing him as the prime minister’s loyalist, shocked the country on Thursday at an internal conference endorsing the agency’s narrative of the October 7 disaster. This came despite repeated recent attacks on that narrative by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While Zini did not directly criticize Netanyahu at all, his siding with his agency’s findings in its probe of October 7, against the prime minister’s narrative, is the first public break between the two after Zini remained silent on the issue for months.
Netanyahu tried to fire Bar over his probing of the “Qatargate” affair, which has deeply impacted Netanyahu’s top aides, and over the former Shin Bet chief’s insistence on a narrative that shared blame for the October 7 disaster between his agency, the IDF, and Netanyahu himself.
Bar had also publicly called for a state inquiry, one of Netanyahu’s most sensitive subjects since he has tried to push that issue off indefinitely to avoid being publicly blamed, along with Bar and numerous top IDF officials (who all resigned between 2024 and 2025).
For months in 2025, Netanyahu fought over Bar’s continued stewardship of the agency, with the High Court of Justice intervening to pause the prime minister’s initial firing of Bar from his position as Shin Bet head.
Finally, Bar stepped down in June, handing the agency over to his deputy “S”, who ran the agency until Zini took over in October.
But with elections in the air, Netanyahu has recently repeatedly attacked the top IDF officials and Bar, leading to most of the former Shin Bet chiefs and some 30 former division heads of the agency calling on Zini to defend Bar’s name.
Zini stands behind probe on October 7
While Zini did not specifically defend Bar, his standing behind the October 7 probe, which the agency carried out under Bar, implied heavily that he sided with his predecessor.
Whereas Netanyahu now only refers to the Israel-Hamas War as “the war of rising up,” in positive terms, and has tried to erase the use of the word “massacre” with reference to the war, Zini referred to the “probe into the Simchat Torah massacre.”
Besides that statement, Zini also strongly rejected any conspiracy theory that any officials within the defense establishment somehow tried to set up Netanyahu to fail on October 7.
Some of Netanyahu’s supporters have been flirting with or spreading such conspiracy theories, and Netanyahu has not dismissed these claims in any sort of sustained manner.
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett responded to Zini’s comments, calling them “important and necessary.”
“Anyone who continues to spread blood libels against the IDF and the Shin Bet is deliberately harming Israel’s security,” Bennett added, referring to Netanyahu.
In the same conference, Zini discussed the many terror challenges facing Israel and thanked “S,” who recently retired, for his years of work, and “N,” his relatively new deputy, for his work to date.
Zini referred to terror threats from Palestinians in the West Bank, Iranian spies, and weapons smuggling over borders, as well as to protecting Israeli officials abroad.
Further, he discussed the growing security challenges in cyber, big data, and other technological areas.
Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.