‘Public deserves to know the truth’: In 1st interview, PM’s ex-military secretary alleges ‘criminal pattern of behavior’ in PMO

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former military secretary confirms reports that the premier’s chief of staff sought to alter an official record from the morning of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, and accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of presenting an incomplete account of the events surrounding the onslaught.

Avi Gil, who served as Netanyahu’s military secretary on October 7, tells Israel Hayom and Channel 12 that he had remained silent until now in the hope of testifying before a state commission of inquiry — the establishment of which Netanyahu and his allies have resisted.

A longer version of the interview is set to be broadcast on Channel 12 this evening.

“There are too many lies in the air, and the public deserves to know the truth,” he says. “Three years have passed since October 7, and two years since I retired from the IDF. I hoped a state commission of inquiry would be established to investigate everything. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, and I doubt it will.”

“What the public is being told is not what actually happened,” he adds. “This isn’t my truth. It’s the country’s truth.”

Asked whether Egypt warned Israel before the attack, as has been reported, Gil says he is unaware of any such message but points to the arrival of an Egyptian intelligence aircraft in late September.

“An Egyptian intelligence plane landed in Israel and was here for a little over 60 minutes. That’s a fact. A plane like that doesn’t just show up,” he says, alleging that whoever met the plane or received a message from it “is still concealing it today.”

Gil adds that he also raised suspicions about possible alterations to official transcripts two weeks into the war, after noticing a “disproportionate collection of material” by Netanyahu’s associates. He contacted Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and asked her “to clarify the rules about what may and may not be done with official transcripts.”

Three months later, he says, a Prime Minister’s Office stenographer informed him that Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, had instructed her to change the recorded time of Gil’s first call with Netanyahu on October 7.

Gil calls the alleged alteration part of “a criminal pattern of behavior,” and suggests it may have been intended either to portray Netanyahu as issuing orders from the attack’s outset or to imply that intelligence conveyed during a second call was already known by officials at the time of the first – potentially supporting Netanyahu’s claims of “a betrayal,” in which critical information was withheld from him.

Gil says any future commission of inquiry must examine the original recordings rather than rely on written records, “because I don’t know what was changed.”

“The document submitted to the state comptroller does not reflect what actually happened,” he says of Netanyahu’s account. “It’s part of the truth, but not the whole truth.”

Likud rejects the allegations, calling the interview “part of the false and politically motivated propaganda campaign against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Likud.”

The party maintains that Netanyahu “received no advance warning before October 7 of an attack by Hamas.”

It adds that officials who detected warning signs failed to alert the prime minister, reiterating claims that “had Prime Minister Netanyahu been updated in real time, everything would have looked different.”