After three years of silence, Maj. Gen. (res.) Avi Gil, who served as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's chief military aide and military secretary during the October 7 massacre and the months that followed, has revealed for the first time what happened behind the closed doors of the Prime Minister's Office.
In a wide-ranging interview with journalist Yoav Limor in Yisrael Hayom, Gil explained his decision to speak now: "There are too many lies in the air, and the public deserves to know the truth. Three years have passed since October 7, and two years since I left the IDF. I hoped a state commission of inquiry would be established to investigate everything, and unfortunately that hasn't happened and it's doubtful it will."
He said the decision to testify came from pressure by the public and bereaved families: "I have no personal interest, only the good of the state. I received requests from dozens of bereaved families and former hostages, asking me to speak, to tell, to testify about what happened on my watch. To tell the truth: without interpretations and without gossip. What they're telling the public is not what really happened."
During the interview, he addressed claims of early warning from Egypt on the eve of the massacre, and revealed a puzzling detail: "I'm not familiar with a warning, 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 with someone, or someone arrived on it to deliver something, a message, an envelope. Someone met with someone, or received something, and didn't report it. And if that happened, and it appears it did, it had to be reported. And whoever met or received is hiding it even today."
He addressed he storm over altered stenographic records and protocols in the Prime Minister's Office. According to him, just two weeks after the war broke out, he noticed that Netanyahu's circle was conducting "disproportionate collection of materials."
"I decided to approach the attorney general," Gil recalled. "I told her we're at war, and that I'm not looking for guilty parties and don't want it to be personal. I asked her to sharpen the guidelines of what's permitted and forbidden to do with stenographic records, and so it was."
He leveled sharp accusations at the office staff: "First of all, we're talking about a criminal pattern of conduct by people who think everything is permitted to them, and the chief of staff behaved like someone who thinks everything is permitted to him.
"It's possible they were already working then on the narrative you see today, that the prime minister was the only one who functioned when the chaos started, because it's a fact that he gave all the instructions in the very first moment. It's a serious scenario, but plausible."
