Israel's police just opened a forgery probe into Netanyahu's own office
1 hour ago · 8 October 2026Share
Kiryat Haleom, Jerusalem, the Prime Minister's Office building. Rakoon · CC0
Avi Gil was Benjamin Netanyahu's military secretary on 7 October 2023. That's the morning Hamas-led fighters invaded southern Israel.
Now he's saying something huge. He says people in Netanyahu's office tried to change the official record of that morning. And police are investigating one of Netanyahu's own top aides over it.
Gil gave the interview to Israel Hayom and Channel 12. Excerpts came out today. A longer version was set to air on Channel 12 this evening.
So what does he actually say happened?
He says Netanyahu's chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, told a stenographer in the Prime Minister's Office to change the recorded time of Gil's first call with Netanyahu that morning.
The real time, Gil says, was 6:40am. The instruction, he says, was to change it to 6:29am.
That's an 11-minute difference. In the official record of the morning Israel was invaded.
And here's the thing. Braverman is now under active police investigation for suspected forgery and fraud over the alleged alteration. He has been questioned by police.
Gil says his suspicions started two weeks into the war. He noticed what he called a disproportionate collection of material by people close to Netanyahu.
So he contacted Gali Baharav-Miara, Israel's Attorney General, and asked her to clarify the rules on handling transcripts.
Three months after that, he says, a stenographer told him about the alleged instruction to change his call time.
Gil says quote "there are too many lies in the air, and the public deserves to know the truth".
That's a man who was in the room that morning, saying the official account doesn't hold up.
The rest of this story is for members.
Aerial view of East Jerusalem and the Old City in 2013. File photo.Godot13 · CC BY-SA 4.0
He also said the public is not being told what actually happened, and that this isn't his truth — it's the country's truth.
Now, back in February, Netanyahu submitted a document to the State Comptroller's Office. He said it held transcripts of security meetings and other records covering 12 years, from the 2014 Gaza war right up to the morning of 7 October 2023.
Gil says that document doesn't tell the whole story. He says it doesn't reflect what actually happened — that it's part of the truth, but not the whole truth.
That's Gil saying the record Netanyahu gave the state's own watchdog is incomplete.
He raised one more claim too. He says an Egyptian intelligence plane landed in Israel in late September 2023, stayed a little over an hour, and that whoever met it, or got a message from it, is still hiding that today.
Likud, Netanyahu's party, has rejected all of it. It calls the interview part of a false and politically motivated campaign against Netanyahu. It says Netanyahu got no advance warning before 7 October of an attack by Hamas. And it says that if he had been updated in real time, everything would have looked different.
So here's some context worth knowing. Nearly every senior military and security official in office on 7 October 2023 has since resigned over the failures that day.
Netanyahu has not.
He has also refused to set up a state commission of inquiry — the kind Israel's Supreme Court would normally appoint. He says a Supreme Court-appointed panel would be biased against him. Instead, he's proposed one appointed by lawmakers, which would include lawmakers from his own governing coalition.
And this is all landing three weeks before Netanyahu faces re-election, on 27 October.
So what don't we know? Whether the state comptroller's office has the original recordings of those calls, or only the transcripts Netanyahu's office handed over. Nor do we know the full scope of any alteration, or whether other investigations beyond the Braverman police probe are under way.
1,200 people were killed and 251 taken captive when Hamas-led fighters invaded southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
Three years on, the question of who knew what, and when, that morning is still being fought over inside Netanyahu's own office.
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