About a month after the IDF published the five new Generals, which will soon be attached to the General Staff’s desk, it is now the turn of the Shin Bet: On Wednesday, Channel 12 announced that the appointment of three new branch heads had been completed. The names, of course, are confidential, but the roles are very important – in the Shin Bet has only 7 branches (which are known to the public), so that the equivalent of about a third of the General staff.
The heads of the branches are directly subordinate to the head of the service – which is directly subordinate to the prime minister. In our case those are Ronen Bar and Benjamin Netanyahu, among which there is some tension against the background of the events of the war and October 7. According to some reports, so far, Netanyahu has stopped making new appointments due to various disagreements, and Bar has appointed only lower-ranking officials who do not require government approval. But now Netanyahu has removed his opposition, and the new apointments are acceptable both to the operational level and to the political level.
The Shin Bet has been most actively involved in the war since its outbreak – because the Gaza Strip is under its operational and research responsibility. Many Shin Bet fighters were killed on the day of the outbreak of the war (and the story of the “tequila” unit jumping into the sector a few hours before the outbreak of the war is well known), and since then the Shin Bet has been carrying the operational burden heroically – but also responsibly, and the head of the Service has already announced his intentions to resign at some future date. Another important operational achievement by the Shin Bet is in the Judea and Samaria arena, which has remained relatively quiet since the outbreak of the war. In the words of General Yaakov Amidror, at a strategic conference held last week in Jerusalem: “The war in Gaza can continue only because of the quiet in Judea and Samaria. If the west bank were on fire, the world would intervene to stop everything by force. And for that you have to give credit to the IDF, the police and the Shin Bet, who are doing a great job.”
