Day: October 8, 2026

For three years, he remained silent. He waited for a state commission of inquiry to be established so that he could testify and tell it everything he knew: what he heard, what he saw and what he took part in. He wanted to tell the truth about what happened during the most dramatic period in Israel’s history. When he realized no commission was being established, he decided to speak.

“There are too many lies in the air, and the public deserves to know the truth. Three years have passed since Oct. 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. I have no personal interest here, only the good of the country. Dozens of bereaved families and former hostages have approached me and asked me to speak. To tell what I know. To testify about what happened on my watch. To tell the truth, without interpretations and without gossip. Just the truth, as I saw it and documented it in real time.”

Maj. Gen. (res.) Avi Gil was the man who was there. For three years, he served as the prime minister’s military secretary, first under Naftali Bennett, then Yair Lapid and, for a year and a half, under Benjamin Netanyahu. He was at Netanyahu’s side throughout the year of the government’s judicial overhaul that preceded the war, as the rift between the prime minister and Israel’s security chiefs deepened, as warnings were conveyed and as the entire security establishment failed to detect Hamas’ preparations for war.

Gil was also at Netanyahu’s side on Oct. 7. He was the man who woke the prime minister and told him war had broken out, and the man who held the now-famous phone calls with him at 6:29 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. He remained alongside Netanyahu during the first months of the war, through the deliberations, decisions, discussions over battlefield operations, the hostage issue and the affair involving alleged alterations to official transcripts.

Now, Gil is speaking about all of it.

‘The public is not being told the truth’

This is an interview every Israeli should read. Gil does not pass judgment or hand out grades. He recounts the facts as they happened and as he documented them in real time. He avoids disclosing classified information, but the picture he paints offers a rare glimpse inside Israel’s nerve center at the moment critical decisions were being made.

He stresses that only a commission of inquiry can ultimately determine what happened. But he also issues a warning: Israeli citizens are being exposed to lies, half-truths and manipulation.

“What the public is being told is not what actually happened. It’s obvious to me that the poison machine will come after me now. They’ll try to smear me and destroy my credibility. But I’m not the story here. The story is the State of Israel. This isn’t my truth. It’s the country’s truth.”

The warnings Netanyahu received before the war

Gil speaks at length in the interview about warnings Netanyahu received before the war and proposals presented to him to eliminate Hamas’ leaders.

Asked whether there had been an Egyptian warning, he replied: “I’m not familiar with one, but let’s talk about facts. 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. Either someone arrived on it to meet someone, or someone came on it to deliver something, a message, an envelope. Someone met someone, or received something, and didn’t report it. And if that happened, and it appears that it did, it had to be reported. Whoever met with someone or received something is still concealing it today.”

Altering transcripts in the Prime Minister’s Office

Gil also reveals for the first time details behind the alleged alteration of an official transcript in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Two weeks into the war, he noticed that Netanyahu associates were conducting what he describes as “disproportionate collection of material.”

“I decided to contact Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. I told her we were at war and that I wasn’t looking for people to blame, nor did I want this to become personal. I asked her to clarify the rules about what may and may not be done with official transcripts. And that’s what happened.”

Three months later, a stenographer in the Prime Minister’s Office told him that Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, had demanded that she change the recorded time of a call Gil had held with Netanyahu on the morning of Oct. 7.

Gil gives a detailed account of what happened during those minutes and says he immediately reported the incident because he believed it constituted a criminal act.

Can you assess why he did it?

“First of all, this is a criminal pattern of behavior by people who think they’re allowed to do anything, and the chief of staff behaved like someone who thought he could do anything. It’s possible they were already working back then on the narrative we’re seeing today, that the prime minister was the only person who functioned when the chaos began, because, look, he supposedly gave all the instructions from the very first second. That’s a serious scenario, but a plausible one. There’s another scenario, and it’s extremely serious.”

Which is?

“Eleven minutes passed between the first call and the second. During those 11 minutes, I received intelligence and information that I didn’t have during the first call, intelligence and information that I conveyed to the prime minister during the second call. And if they can establish that this intelligence and information already existed at 6:29, that means someone already knew then what was going to happen. In other words, that there had been a betrayal.”

Should we assume that other transcripts were falsified?

“Any commission of inquiry that is established must insist on receiving the complete recordings, not the transcripts, because I don’t know what was changed. I would expect the state comptroller to do the same, rather than relying on excerpts from transcripts provided to him by the prime minister.”

Netanyahu says the document he submitted to the state comptroller represents the complete truth.

“The document submitted to the state comptroller does not reflect what actually happened. It’s part of the truth, but not the whole truth.”

The Likud party said in response: “This interview is part of the false and politically motivated propaganda campaign against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Likud, aimed at bringing down the right-wing government and installing a left-wing government that would establish a Palestinian state.”

According to Likud’s response, “Prime Minister Netanyahu received no advance warning before Oct. 7 of an attack by Hamas from the Gaza Strip, as President Trump, President Biden’s adviser Brett McGurk, the UAE government, the Egyptian government and others have testified. The opposite is true. As shown in the official records Prime Minister Netanyahu submitted to the state comptroller, the heads of the security establishment repeatedly argued that Hamas was deterred, that it was interested in an arrangement and that humanitarian concessions should be granted in order to ‘preserve the quiet.’

“During the night of Oct. 7,” the Likud response continued, “there were those who saw all the warning signs in real time and did nothing. They did not inform the police, the local emergency response teams, the kibbutzim, the soldiers along the border, the people attending the Nova music festival or the prime minister. Had Prime Minister Netanyahu been updated in real time, everything would have looked different.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu was the one who decided on the ground maneuver in Gaza and stood firm against pressure from President Biden to make do with an aerial campaign. In the face of the heaviest pressure from Israel and abroad, Prime Minister Netanyahu was the one who led the conquest of Gaza and Rafah, the tremendous success in securing the release of every last one of our hostages, the pager operation that stunned the world, the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the capture of the Mount Hermon summit, the elimination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the elimination of Iranian nuclear scientists and, above all, the rescue of Israel from annihilation by Iranian nuclear bombs.”

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