Itzik Bontzel, a bereaved father, talked with ISA director Ronen Bar and personally demanded that he resign.
Itzik Bonzel, the father of Sgt. Amit Bonzel, who fell in Gaza, shared in an interview with 103FM about the meeting with ISA director Ronen Bar after the Supreme Court hearing, where he initially called for Bar to end his tenure.
“I was at a meeting last week that was initiated by the head of the ISA who invited us to the office, a meeting that lasted more than two hours. Not an easy conversation, a very difficult conversation, both for us and from his perspective,” Bonzel said.
“We are talking about a person who, had he lived up to his responsibilities [on the night of October 6th] and dealt with things properly, today Amit would be alive, and with him, hundreds if not thousands of Israelis who have been harmed, and many more. From the outset, we knew that for us, we were coming to a meeting to demand that he stand trial before the people. The meeting was not easy.”
“He did not expect such a meeting with us. The purpose of the meeting was to silence the noisemakers, and I am very active in everything related to the hostages and inquiry committees. I told him at the beginning of the conversation that I am not prepared to discuss with him what happened on October 7, that will be done by an inquiry committee that will be required to answer the toughest questions.”
He explained what his basic demand was in the conversation: “I told him ‘I demand to know when you will resign as the head of the ISA and stop harming this holy organization,’ and he was shocked. He told me it’s a matter of weeks, at most two months. I said to him: ‘Ronen, I need to leave here with an answer. Give me a date, I will go from here to Netanyahu and give him the date and mediate between you and him about the timing, and you will free the people of Israel from the [protestors’] plan to bring about a ruling that Netanyahu is incapacited.'”
“These are words of truth,” Bonzel emphasized, adding: “Harming an organization like the ISA is a risk to the lives of civilians. It cannot be that such an organization is exposed to a citizen like me. This is a clandesstine organization that must focus on the processes it operates on, it cannot be that people are focused on whether the head of their organization is tarnishing their name and disrupting the work of the ISA.”
“They (those opposing the ISA heads’ dismissal are not looking for the truth about the October 7th massacre, instead they are looking to change the government, and that does not interest me. What is important to me is why at every Passover Seder, Amit’s chair ) now be empty,” he emphasized. “I cannot bring Amit back, I understand that, but I am committed to the next generations, that they will not undergo another such invasion in 50 years (note: the Yom Kippur War broke out 50 years before the Oct 7th Hamas invasion).”
