Reports: PM working to prevent accurate transcription of his wartime discussions
Public broadcaster says premier has been holding sensitive talks on WhatsApp so they’re not recorded, after news site reports on concerns that minutes of meetings are being altered
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been attempting to leave his conversations regarding the management of the war in Gaza untraceable, two separate Hebrew media outlets this week suggested.
According to the Ynet news site, senior figures in the security establishment fear that efforts are being made to edit the minutes of wartime discussions held with Netanyahu after discovering discrepancies between transcripts of the meetings and what the figures had heard in real time.
Officials from the Prime Minister’s Office reportedly approached Netanyahu’s former military secretary, Maj. Gen. Avi Gil, to warn him that people from the premier’s inner circle were attempting to tinker with the meeting records. The Wednesday report said one of the meetings, whose records were tampered with, dealt with “sensitive preparations for a significant political event,” but it did not elaborate further.
Gil later sent a letter to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara expressing his concerns over the matter.
In addition, meetings at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, where most cabinet discussions were held at the beginning of the war, have their audio recorded. However, senior political sources told Ynet they could not be assured that was the case for meetings held at Netanyahu’s offices in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where more recent meetings have been held.
Netanyahu’s office denied the report, calling it a “complete lie.”
“Whoever is familiar with the processes knows that something like this could not happen. All discussions are recorded and transcribed by law, and therefore their content cannot be changed,” his office said.
The Israel Defense Forces, Gil and Baharav-Miara did not comment on the report.
Meanwhile, the Kan public broadcaster reported Friday that Netanyahu has been holding sensitive discussions on the war via phone calls on the WhatsApp app, which does not allow conversations to be recorded.
Weeks after the Hamas-led October 7 terror onslaught that started the war, the Haaretz daily reported that Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman — who was previously admitted to shredding documents at the Prime Minister’s Office — seized classified documents concerning the months leading up to the war, leading Baharav-Miara to order National Security Council chief Tzachi Hanegbi to return the documents.
The latest reports come as Netanyahu continues to refuse to explicitly say that he is responsible for what happened on October 7 — unlike many Israeli security and military officials and some political figures who have.
The premier has also declined to initiate a state commission of inquiry into Israel’s failures leading up to the massacre, arguing that doing so would harm the war effort and should only commence after the fighting ends, and not explicitly committing to a state commission as opposed to a less powerful inquiry body.
