Netanyahu’s former military secretary alleges attempt to alter October 7 records

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former military secretary on Thursday alleged that the premier presented an incomplete account of the events surrounding Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and that Netanyahu’s chief of staff sought to alter an official record from that morning.

Avi Gil, who served as Netanyahu’s military secretary on October 7, told 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 Thursday evening.

“There are too many lies in the air, and the public deserves to know the truth,” Gil said. “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 added. “This isn’t my truth. It’s the country’s truth.”

Asked whether Egypt had warned Israel before the attack, which Netanyahu has denied, Gil said he was unaware of any such message but pointed 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 said, alleging that whoever met the plane or received a message from it “is still concealing it today.”

Gil added 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 said, 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.

Braverman is under investigation for suspected forgery and fraud over the alleged illegal alteration of records, and has been questioned by police. He is suspected of having altered the stated time at which Netanyahu first received an update on the October 7 Hamas invasion via phone call from Gil, allegedly changing it from 6:40 a.m. to 6:29 a.m.

Gil called the alleged alteration part of “a criminal pattern of behavior,” and suggested 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 during the first – potentially supporting Netanyahu’s claims of “a betrayal,” in which critical information was withheld from him.

Gil said 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 said of Netanyahu’s account. “It’s part of the truth, but not the whole truth.”

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

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

It added 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.”

On October 7, 2023, Hamas led thousands of terrorists to invade southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 captive, thereby triggering a devastating multifront war. Nearly all senior military and security figures who were in office at the time have resigned over the attack, but Netanyahu, who was prime minister, has not.

Netanyahu has regularly blamed security officials for the failures of October 7, and asserted that if he had been woken in the early hours of that day, when security chiefs supposedly discussed concerning signs coming from Gaza, he would have ordered swift action and prevented the massacre.

He has also refused to establish a state commission of inquiry – Israel’s highest investigative authority – into the disaster, arguing that an independent panel appointed by the Supreme Court would be biased against his government, which has sought to curtail the powers of the judiciary. He has argued instead for a panel appointed by lawmakers, with its mandate and scope set by politicians.