Ronen Bergman

Ronen Bergman    (investigative journalist)
Nationality	Israeli
Member of	Munich Security Conference/Young Leaders

Ronen Bergman,

Career

Ronen Bergman has written for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek in the United States, and for The Times, The Guardian, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Europe.

In 2018 he was the intelligence correspondent for Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

Publications

Bergman's "explosive" book "'Rise and Kill First: The secret history of Israel’s targeted killings" details such Israeli plans as the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat which included a plot to blow up passenger planes and football stadiums. Bergman persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell their stories, some using their real names. The book strongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to eventually kill Arafat, an act its officials have consistently denied.

 

Quotes by Ronen Bergman

Page	Quote	Date	Source
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7	“Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan. Hamas had "decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope," analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division. But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet. On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing. The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times. The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out. The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off. “In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.”	2023	New York Times
Hannibal Directive	“The IDF instructed all its fighting units in practice to follow the 'Hannibal Directive', although without clearly mentioning this explicit name. The instruction is to stop 'at all costs' any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to the original 'Hannibal Directive', despite repeated assurances by the security establishment that the procedure has been cancelled. It is not clear at this point how many of the abductees were killed due to the activation of this [Hannibal] order on October 7.”	6 September 2024

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Munich Security Conference/2014	31 January 2014	2 February 2014	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 50th Munich Security Conference
Munich Security Conference/2015	6 February 2015	8 February 2015	Germany Munich Bavaria	"400 high-ranking decision-makers in international politics, including some 20 heads of state and government as well as more than 60 foreign and defence ministers, met in Munich to discuss current crises and conflicts."
Munich Security Conference/2018	12 February 2018	14 February 2018	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 54th Munich Security Conference
Munich Security Conference/2019	15 February 2019	17 February 2019	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 55th Munich Security Conference, which included "A Spreading Plague" aimed at "identifying gaps and making recommendations to improve the global system for responding to deliberate, high consequence biological events."
Munich Security Conference/2020	14 February 2020	16 February 2020	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 56th Munich Security Conference, in 2020, "welcomed an unprecedented number of high-ranking international decision-makers."

 

Event Witnessed

Event	Location(s)	Description
Munich Security Conference/2016	Munich Bavaria Germany	The 52nd Munich Security Conference

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