Shin Bet chief said to defend removal of Oct. 7 memorial: ‘Enough time has passed’

Relative of slain agent slams remarks by David Zini in phone call with bereaved families: ‘How does a sentence like that come out of your mouth?’

Shin Bet chief David Zini reportedly told bereaved families that he ordered an October 7 memorial to be removed from the agency’s headquarters since “enough time has passed since the attack,” a relative said Sunday.

Zini, who has come under fire for the controversial decision, defended the move to dismantle the memorial to the agency’s employees who were killed in the 2023 Hamas attack in a call with bereaved families on Thursday, Channel 12 news reported.

Zoli Gyongyosi — whose sister-in-law Smadar Mor Idan, a Shin Bet employee, and her husband, Roee Idan, were murdered during the massacre — told the TV network that he was stunned by Zini’s remarks.

“Only someone who is part of this story, part of this reality, can understand what it means to say ‘time has passed.’ There is no such thing as ‘time has passed,'” Gyongyosi said in an interview with Channel 12.

“I’m raising three orphans, who saw their parents murdered before their eyes. One girl was kidnapped to Gaza for 51 days. How does a sentence like that come out of your mouth?” he said of Zini’s remarks.

Roee and Smadar’s daughter Avigail, who was three years old during the October 7 attack, was abducted to Gaza and released nearly two months later during a temporary truce. Her two older siblings, Michael and Amalia, survived the attack after hiding in a closet, and the three children were later all taken in and raised by Zoli Gyongyosi and his wife Liron, Smadar’s sister.

The website for the Shin Bet agency lists 10 active or retired agents who were killed as a result of the October 7 onslaught: Mor Idan, Itay Yehoshua, Maor Shalom, Michael Ben Moshe, Omer Gavra, Ido Edri, Ilay Nachman, Amit Wachs, Yossi Tahar and Itay Moreno.

According to the Haaretz newspaper, which first reported Zini’s decision to remove the memorial, the Shin Bet chief apologized to the families during Thursday’s call for the fact that they learned about the move from media reports rather than directly from the agency.

Zini — who became Shin Bet chief in October amid controversy surrounding his appointment — gave the order to dismantle the memorial in April, following Memorial Day, Haaretz revealed, by reportedly saying that there was no reason staff should “have to see the debacle [of October 7] in front of our faces every day.”

The Shin Bet confirmed in a statement to Hebrew media that the display had been taken down, saying that Zini felt a memorial to only some of the massacre’s victims didn’t do justice to the scope of the attack. It noted that the office also has a memorial wall featuring all of the attack’s victims, though it did not give further details on what that display includes.

The decision reportedly sparked fierce backlash among current and former officials in the security agency, with some said to tell the Shin Bet chief that the move “crossed a red line.”