From the Liveblog of
Monday, November 11, 2024
Report: Probe into doctored PM’s office protocols centers on warnings Hamas activated Israeli SIM cards ahead of Oct. 7
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
The protocols from security meetings that senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Office allegedly sought to change had to do — at least in part — with warnings received by PMO officials about Israeli SIM cards activated by Hamas forces in the lead-up to the October 7, 2023, attack, Ynet reports.
The allegation that senior PMO officials tried to blackmail an IDF officer in the PMO to get him to change records of meetings is one of several scandals swirling around the PMO in recent weeks.
The IDF said earlier this year that “several indicative signs accumulated” in the hours before the early morning onslaught, “which included, among other things, the activation of only dozens of SIMs, which had been activated in previous events in the past.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that he was only told about the SIMs after the attack had begun.
Citing officials familiar with the details, Ynet reports that law enforcement is checking whether senior officials in the PMO tried to blackmail a military intelligence officer in Netanyahu’s office who received a warning about the SIMs ahead of time, in an attempt to force him to change the protocols in order to show less responsibility borne by Netanyahu for the October 7 failure.
The officer, Col. S., received an update hours before the attack about Hamas units in both northern and southern Gaza activating SIM cards, according to Ynet.
Months after October 7, Netanyahu’s then-military secretary Avi Gil “was surprised to discover, when the transcripts and logs [from that night] were brought to him, that important details in the logs, and some essential topics in the content of the transcripts, had been changed in a way that created the impression, apparently, that the PMO knew much less about the SIMs,” Ynet reports.
“When he approached the clerk who compiled the record and asked her the meaning of the incident, she answered that she had done so on the orders of the same senior official in the bureau and that she could not disobey his instructions for fear that he would mistreat her.”
Netanyahu’s office firmly denies the report, calling it “another complete fabrication that is also part of an unprecedented media witch hunt against the Prime Minister’s Office in wartime, designed to whitewash the serious failures of others on the night of October 7.”
