Israeli general: Netanyahu's staff tried to falsify the war protocol

This was said by General Avi Gil, then Netanyahu's military secretary, in two interviews on Friday, one with TV12, the country's most watched channel, and the other with the Israel Ha-Yom daily newspaper. Gil's description of the event, which shook the nationalist camp, flies in the face of Netanyahu's story, which is that he was the only one who acted resolutely in great chaos. Gil emphasized in his description that Netanyahu's accusations against the military leadership - for withholding information about the attack from him - are baseless.

- A couple of weeks after the outbreak of war, I noticed that Netanyahu's staff was collecting materials in large quantities for no reasonable reason, says Gil to TV12.

- I asked the government's legal advisor to make it clear to the government office that it has no right to touch the transcripts of secret conversations.

Gil woke Netanyahu at 6:40 in the morning. But the head of Netanyahu's office, Avishai Braverman, is under police investigation for suspected falsification of this information. He is said to have demanded from the secretaries of the chancellery that they change the time sequence in the transcript of incoming calls on October 7, 2023. so that Netanyahu would appear to have started to act as early as 06:29. When the stenographers refused to change the documents, Braverman did it himself, according to the suspects.

Gil called Netanyahu at 06:40 and informed him that "We are at war". Netanyahu's now famous answer was "But why are they shooting?". Netanyahu's opponents interpret this as evidence that he was sure that the billions of dollars he let Qatar pour on Hamas had "tamed" the organization.

General Gil said on Friday that only an independent commission of inquiry can objectively examine these events, and he urged future investigators "not to be content with the transcripts but to rely only on the audio recordings made of everything said on the phones of the office."

Gil also confirmed what Netanyahu and his spokesmen have vigorously denied in recent weeks: on September 26, 2023, a plane from Egypt arrived at Ben Gurion Airport east of Tel Aviv. According to the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, the plane was carrying Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel, who had come to inform Israeli colleagues of "unusual military activity by Hamas".

When this secret visit became known, the airport management initially denied that any such aircraft had landed, but recently backtracked and admitted that the information was correct. Netanyahu denies Kamel's visit, and also denies a phone call with the same message from UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed a couple of days later. To admit to having received such concrete warnings just before the Hamas attack would be, as Netanyahu sees it, to accept responsibility for the military fiasco – the one he took so much pains to blame on others.