Maj. Gen. (res.) Avi Gil, who served as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military secretary before and during the October 7 attack, said Thursday that a stenographer in the Prime Minister’s Office told him she had been instructed to change the recorded time of a key phone call on the morning of the massacre, an act he described as “falsification.”
Gil told Channel 12 that, in January 2024, the stenographer entered his office and said she had been ordered by the prime minister’s chief of staff to change the time of a four-minute call from 6:40 a.m. to 6:29 a.m. “She told me, ‘I’m not allowed to change it. The computer shows and says 6:40 to 6:44,’” Gil said. “Those are facts, and there is no dispute about them.” He said he immediately documented the account in a handwritten note to the attorney general and recommended that any future commission of inquiry demand the original recordings rather than relying solely on transcripts. Earlier reporting by ynet had detailed suspicions surrounding an effort to change the time of the call.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Maj. Gen. (res.) Avi Gil
(Photo: GPO)
“The first thing I asked myself was why anyone was dealing with the transcript of a four-minute conversation on the morning of October 7,” Gil said. “Who cared about it, and what was in that conversation that made it important?” He added that, in his view, “someone was dealing with certain narratives” months after the attack. “This is changing a transcript, changing the truth. Factually, there was an instruction to change the time of a call.”
Gil also said that before October 7 security officials had periodically recommended targeted operations in Gaza that the political leadership chose not to approve. “There were recommendations from time to time to carry out targeted operations in Gaza. Those recommendations were not accepted,” he said. “I’m talking about the facts, and the leadership has broader considerations. There were actions that were recommended and not approved, and I stand behind what I’m saying.”
The former military secretary also confirmed an earlier report that then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar had delivered a warning to Netanyahu in July 2023 that Israel was facing the danger of war. According to the warning previously reported by Yedioth Ahronoth, Bar told Netanyahu: “I am giving you a warning of war today. I cannot give you an exact day and hour, but this is the warning.” Gil stressed, however, that it was not a specific warning of an impending attack from Gaza. “Was there a specific, focused warning from Gaza? Absolutely not,” he said. Bar has separately said he instructed that Gil be updated at 5:15 a.m. on October 7, although Netanyahu’s first documented conversation with Gil came at 6:29 a.m.
Gil said he received a call from the Shin Bet chief’s office at 6:12 a.m. that morning and was told of suspicious signs in Gaza, including unusual SIM card activity and movement underground, alongside indicators that appeared to reduce the urgency because similar behavior had previously occurred during Hamas exercises. He said the Shin Bet planned further assessments and had ordered an operational team south as a precaution. “While we were talking, the many alerts began at 6:29 a.m.,” he said.
Looking back at the preceding night, Gil rejected the idea that Netanyahu would ordinarily have been awakened based on the intelligence picture then available. He said the intelligence officer who saw the overnight message understood that the word “routine” appeared repeatedly and that there was no indication of immediate urgency.
“Cases in which a prime minister, in a phone call, decides against all the heads of the security establishment are rare, if they exist at all,” Gil said. “The chief of staff and the head of the Shin Bet do not call the prime minister directly. That is what the military secretary is for. There is one address.”
Gil was also asked about reports that Netanyahu may have received warnings from Egypt or the United Arab Emirates before the massacre. He said he was not in the office on the dates associated with the reported Emirati meeting and therefore could not say what occurred. But he pointed to recent reports of an Egyptian aircraft arriving in Israel and departing shortly afterward. “A plane like that does not come for a training sortie,” he said, while stressing that he did not know who, if anyone, had met its passengers.