PM’s ex-military secretary: Netanyahu’s chief of staff tampered with Oct. 7 phone records

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Chief of Staff Tzachi Braverman tried to tamper with phone records from the morning of October 7, 2023, alleges Netanyahu’s military secretary at the time.

The gathering of meeting minutes from the morning of October 7, 2023 began two or three weeks into the war, says Avi Gil in an interview with Channel 12.

At the end of October 2023, he says, several individuals approached him to inform him that there was an “unusual” minutes-gathering effort. “This gathering of minutes was done against the regulations,” he says.

He says he turned to the Attorney General and asked her to officially make clear the rules in order to stop the irregular gathering of the minutes, which she did.

Then a stenographer at the Prime Minister’s Office told Gil in person in January 2024 that she was asked to retrieve the record of the phone call he had with Netanyahu on the secure line at 6:40 a.m. on October 7, and that Braverman told her to falsely change the documented time of that first secure call between Gil and Netanyahu to 6:29 a.m.

“She came into my office, closed the door and told me everything,” he says.

“She understood it was a departure from accepted practice… A document had been sent out two months earlier explaining what is and is not permitted… She told me, it is forbidden for me to change it.”

She noted that the call had been recorded, and was marked 06:40 to 06:44.

“If I remember correctly, the change was carried out by the chief of staff,” he says. “Those are the facts. They cannot be disputed.”

“The first thing I remember was wondering why in January 2024 are they busying themselves with the stenogram of a four-minute phone call on the morning of October 7?”

“To whom is it important? What was in the conversation that made it so important to deal with it?”

It is a fact that someone was busy shaping narratives, and it was important for that person to check, in January, something that happened on October 7, he says.

Asked if such a change was unusual, Gil marvels: “It’s changing a stenogram. It’s changing the truth. Is that unusual? I hope so.”

He says he immediately wrote a handwritten note to the Attorney General to update her. “It was important for me to write this down,” he says, to counter any subsequent false claims. “This is forgery.”

Asked whether there may have been other such falsifications, he says, “It is a fact that they ordered the time of a call to be changed. Were there other such changes? I don’t know.”

“But I have a recommendation for the commission of inquiry that will be established, to the State Comptroller who has taken protocols [for investigation],” he goes on. “Don’t rely solely on the written transcripts of things. Demand the original recordings… Listen to what was seen.”

“I saw a change to a protocol.”

Gil says “it is possible” that the change in the time of the conversation was to set the stage to claim that senior officials knew about the attack ahead of time and, in an act of betrayal, intentionally kept it from the prime minister until the attack was underway.

You are describing criminal behavior, he is told by his interviewers, that harms the state and its security. So why are the indictments not being issued by law enforcement authorities? “Ask them,” he replies. “I know the facts. And the facts are not disputed. The time of the call was changed. [Or rather], there was an effort to change it, because we caught it. That’s a grave incident, and the fact is, they’re not denying it. They’re telling stories.”