Netanyahu’s former military secretary breaks three years of silence, and the campaign turns

Avi Gil, the retired general who served as Benjamin Netanyahu’s military secretary from December 2022 to May 2024 and was in post on 7 October 2023, gave his first interview since the attack on 8 October, to Channel 12 and to Israel Hayom — the Adelson-owned daily that built its circulation as the prime minister’s most reliable platform. Gil said Netanyahu passed up clear-cut opportunities to bring hostages out of Gaza alive because taking them would have threatened his coalition, that the prime minister did not ask to speak to his security chiefs on the morning of the attack, and that Netanyahu’s chief of staff altered the prime minister’s phone records from that day, which Gil called part of “a criminal pattern of behavior.” On the hostages he told the interviewers, in CNN’s rendering: “Bereaved families approach me. I sit with them… And yes, you know that some of them could have come home earlier.”

Everything above is allegation by a named man, not finding. Netanyahu has denied it and counter-claimed that Gil “chose not to wake him up” that morning; that counter-claim is unverified too. Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party said it had appealed to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to open a criminal investigation into Netanyahu’s 7 October conduct — an appeal announced, with no reported response from her office. Avigdor Liberman alleged treason, which is a party leader’s rhetoric and not a filing. None of this began with Gil: Eisenkot and Yair Lapid had already demanded both a criminal probe and a state commission of inquiry on the anniversary itself, 7 October, per the Jerusalem Post. Netanyahu continues to oppose a state commission and has circulated a document deflecting responsibility, reported by the Post’s syndicated version as 55 pages.

The one hard number in the window arrives with a warning attached. A Times of Israel/Zman Yisrael poll by Yossi Tatika of Tatika Research & Media, using the Adgenda panel, found the anti-Netanyahu bloc has regained its lead, with Eisenkot’s Yashar first and Likud second. The sample was 500 respondents with a margin of error of ±4.4%, and fieldwork ran 7–8 October — straddling the broadcast. Anyone who tells you this instrument measures a Gil effect is reading a sample of 500 past the point it can carry. Seat figures for either bloc were not published in the entry we could retrieve, and we are not estimating them.

Assessment: The structural fact of the week is that on 29 September Netanyahu filed a libel suit against Haaretz over a report that he was warned before 7 October, and nine days later a named former aide made a claim of the same category on prime-time television. A libel writ against a newspaper is a manageable fight; a decorated general with a document promise is not, which is why the commission of inquiry — not the attorney general — is the real object of the campaign. Distrust three things: Gil’s reading of Netanyahu’s state of mind, which is characterisation; the promised documents, which have not been produced; and the phone-records allegation, which no second source has yet confirmed.