Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former military secretary Maj. Gen. Avi Gil has disclosed an attempt to alter the recorded time of a key phone call in the morning of October 7, 2023 attacks.
In an interview with Channel 12 on Thursday, Gil said a stenographer in the Prime Minister’s Office told him she had been instructed to change the timestamp of a four-minute call from 6:40 a.m. to 6:29 a.m. on October 7, 2023. He described the alleged instruction as “falsification” and said he documented the account in a handwritten note to the attorney general in January 2024.
“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.”
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, 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.
The disclosure adds to questions over the Israeli leadership’s handling of intelligence preceding the October 7 attacks and its response as Hamas’ offensive unfolded.
Source: Israeli media (translated and edited by Al-Manar English Website)