Investigators Assess if Netanyahu’s Aides Forged Oct. 7 Phone Records
"Aides to Benjamin Netanyahu are under investigation over accusations of leaks, record-doctoring and intimidation. The Israeli prime minister’s office denies the claims.
On the morning that Hamas raided Israel last year, a top Israeli general called his prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to tell him that hundreds of militants appeared to be preparing to invade.
Now, aides to the prime minister are under investigation for altering details about that call in the official record of Mr. Netanyahu’s activities that day, according to four officials briefed on the investigation.
The investigation is seen as deeply sensitive in Israel, where the question of what Mr. Netanyahu knew in advance of Hamas’s invasion, and when he was told, could prove crucial to his political future. It is expected to play a key part in a postwar assessment of the role political and military leaders may have played in one of the worst military failures in Israel’s history.
The accusation is just one of several leveled at Mr. Netanyahu’s aides in recent weeks. While Mr. Netanyahu himself is not a subject of a police inquiry, officials in his office are under investigation for trying to bolster his reputation throughout Israel’s war with Hamas by leaking classified military documents, altering official transcripts of his conversations and intimidating people who controlled access to those records.
Though disparate and complex, the cases have helped foster the impression among Mr. Netanyahu’s critics that his team has used illicit means to improve how he is perceived, at the expense of either the truth or national security, or both. Mr. Netanyahu and his office have denied the accusations, countering that it is his accusers who, by spreading falsehoods, have undermined Israel at a time of national peril.
The full extent of the new claims has not been revealed because most of them are subject to a gag order. Officials who told The New York Times about the investigations did so on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly about the matter.
Case 1: Phone records
On the day that Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the prime minister spoke frequently by phone with senior security officials, including with his military secretary, Maj. Gen. Avi Gil.
Police officers are assessing if aides to the prime minister secretly changed the records of those phone calls, according to the four officials briefed on the investigation.
The investigation began after General Gil, who left his post in May, complained in writing to the attorney general that the official transcripts of the calls he had that morning with the prime minister appeared to have been altered, the officials said. General Gil said in his complaint that a senior aide to the prime minister had forced one of the transcribers to doctor the transcripts, the officials said.
In one of the conversations early on Oct. 7, General Gil told the prime minister that hundreds of Hamas operatives had started behaving in a way that suggested that they may be about to invade Israel, according to three officials briefed on the investigation. The timing of that call is one of the details that is said to have been changed in the official transcripts.
The content and timing of these calls are important because they could help shape the way that Mr. Netanyahu is seen by both voters and historians.
For more than a year, Mr. Netanyahu has denied being briefed in advance about the invasion. He has avoided setting up a state inquiry to assess the culpability of Israel’s military and political leaders, including himself.
Case 2: An embarrassing video
The forgery case has been compounded by fears that an aide to Mr. Netanyahu intimidated a military officer who controlled access to the phone records, according to four officials briefed on the incident.
The officer was filmed on a security camera installed in the prime minister’s headquarters committing an act that could cause him personal embarrassment, the officials said.
After the incident, a senior aide to the prime minister approached the officer and told him that he had obtained a video of the embarrassing act, the officials said. The senior aide was the same person accused of ordering the transcriber to tamper with the records of Mr. Netanyahu’s conversations, according to the officials.
The officer told his commanders about the approach, saying that he feared that the aide might use the video to blackmail him in the future, the officials said.
Case 3: A leaked document
Mr. Netanyahu’s aides are also accused of secretly giving a sensitive document to a foreign news outlet, according to six officials briefed on the case.
The document was published in early September, as Mr. Netanyahu came under pressure from large parts of Israeli society to agree to a cease-fire deal with Hamas that would allow for the release of dozens of hostages held by the group.
Mr. Netanyahu argued against a truce, saying that the terms of the deal would allow Hamas to regroup. His stance infuriated many of the hostages’ families, who argued that he had forsaken the captives in favor of far-right lawmakers who had threatened to collapse his coalition if he agreed to a truce.
To bolster his position on Sep. 8, Mr. Netanyahu made a statement at his weekly cabinet meeting citing an article published days earlier in Bild, a German tabloid.
The article was an account of a memorandum, written by a Hamas intelligence officer and later obtained by the Israeli military, that had been leaked to the newspaper.
Bild said the document showed that Hamas sought to manipulate the hostage families into persuading Mr. Netanyahu to compromise in the truce talks and agree to terms less favorable to Israel. Mr. Netanyahu cited Bild’s reporting to argue that Hamas sought to “sow discord among us, to use psychological warfare on the hostages’ families.”
Investigators are examining if Mr. Netanyahu was citing a document that his own aides had leaked, the officials said. But there is no suggestion that Mr. Netanyahu is under investigation himself or that he has been questioned.
Why the leak is being investigated
Israeli officials often give documents to reporters, but the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, is examining this particular leak because the document was taken from a highly classified military intelligence database, according to the six officials briefed on the case. One of Mr. Netanyahu’s aides, Eli Feldstein, has been arrested as part of the investigation, along with four unnamed officers accused of helping to procure the document. All five were detained through a rare legal provision only intended for use in cases in which there are extreme threats to national security.
Mr. Feldstein’s lawyer declined to comment.
The Shin Bet is not investigating a separate article, published in early September in the Jewish Chronicle, a London-based newspaper, that also bolstered Mr. Netanyahu’s narrative, according to four of the officials. That article, which The Chronicle has since retracted, is thought to have been completely fabricated instead of being based on a leaked document, the officials said. It is therefore not considered a security threat worthy of investigation, the officials said.
The investigation into the document leaked to Bild is focused on why officials without full security clearance, like Mr. Feldstein, were allowed to access such a classified document, how such a sensitive document found its way to the press and whether the leak compromised a method by which Israel gathers intelligence. By publicizing the fact that Israel had obtained this document, the leak risked revealing to Hamas that Israel had gained access to a particular stream of information that the group may have previously believed was secure.
While the content of the Bild article is not the focus of the investigation, military leaders are privately frustrated at how the document appears to have been presented by the prime minister’s office to Bild, the officials said.
The newspaper said the document reflected the position of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s hard-line leader in Gaza until his killing in October. But defense officials say that the document was most likely never seen by Mr. Sinwar and that, either way, it suggested that Hamas was willing to show more flexibility in the negotiations than Mr. Netanyahu had acknowledged in public.
Asked for comment, Bild declined to say who had given it the document. The Shin Bet and the police did not respond to requests for comment.
Why the claims have angered some Israelis
To the prime minister’s opponents, the accusations foster the impression that Mr. Netanyahu’s team has used underhanded means to distract from his failures. Critics argue that his aides have prioritized his own political survival, at a time when he should have been singularly focused on the country’s defense.
That impression has been boosted by the fact that Mr. Netanyahu has for years refused to resign despite standing trial for bribery and fraud. To opponents, that refusal suggests he cares more about his own fate than the country’s stability. To Mr. Netanyahu and his allies, the trial is a spurious attempt to overthrow an elected leader.
Mr. Netanyahu’s response
The prime minister’s reaction to the new investigation echoes how he has approached his trial.
He and his office have issued several statements rebutting the accusations, portraying them as a witch hunt.
“As with the previous attempts to inflate accusations against the Prime Minister and those around him, the present matter will also not yield anything whatsoever, but will certainly lead to difficult questions regarding arbitrary enforcement,” his office said in a statement.
Days later, the bureau issued an even stronger response, denouncing the detentions of people under investigation and saying that, “In a democratic country, people are not detained in solitary confinement for 20 days — without access to a lawyer for extended periods — simply to extract false statements against the prime minister.”
Myra Noveck contributed reporting."
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