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Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff was questioned by police as part of an investigation into suspicions that he altered records of the timeline of the Israeli prime minister’s phone calls in the early moments of Hamas’s October 7 attack last year.
The probe comes as Netanyahu’s office is already under pressure over a separate investigation into the leak of classified documents to the foreign press, as part of which a media adviser to Netanyahu and four military personnel were arrested.
Tzachi Braverman, a long-standing Netanyahu aide and the prime minister’s chief of staff since 2022, was questioned on Thursday over suspicion of forgery and breach of trust, before subsequently being released.
Braverman referred a request for comment to his lawyer, Jack Chen, who said the chief of staff had “answered all the investigators’ questions and already returned to work”, and that the claims against him were “baseless”.
“Contrary to publications, the chief of staff acted by virtue of his authority and within the scope of his position. It is already clear that there was no ‘cooking of protocols’,” Chen said.
The investigation relates to telephone calls between Netanyahu and his military secretary, Avi Gil, in the first minutes of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which is widely regarded as the worst security and intelligence failure in the country’s 76-year history.
The first call between Gil and Netanyahu took place at 06.29 as Hamas’s attack began and the second was held 11 minutes later at 06.40.
According to the Haaretz newspaper, police suspect that Braverman sought to make the call records show that Netanyahu gave orders to Gil on how to deal with Hamas’s attack during their first phone call rather than waiting until the second, which was held on a secure line known as the red phone.
Israel’s police did not respond to a request for comment.
However, Guy Levy, a spokesman for Netanyahu’s Likud party, denied that Braverman had changed the record in a way that was beneficial to the prime minister, saying that he had simply changed it to show that the first call took place at 06.29, not 06.40.
“The chief of staff acted to correct an error in the protocol, a correction that did not help the prime minister in any way,” Levy wrote on X. “A correction to the truth that matches all the testimonies and time records on the red phone.”
Netanyahu himself earlier this week dismissed reports about Braverman and the separate case involving his media adviser as an “organised witch-hunt” designed “to harm the country’s leadership and weaken us in the middle of war”.
The news of Braverman’s questioning emerged as Netanyahu also came under pressure from the attorney-general, Gali Baharav-Miara, to “re-examine” the tenure of his ultranationalist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir over allegations that he had interfered in police activities.
In a letter published late Thursday Baharav-Miara detailed instances of Ben-Gvir intervening in police actions, which she said threatened the force’s apolitical status.
“The combination of the allegedly improper interventions in the activities of the police and the dependence of police officers on the minister for their promotion undermines the possibility of ensuring that the police will act out of loyalty to the public and not to the political echelon,” she said.
Ben-Gvir hit back, accusing Baharav-Miara on X of an “attempted coup” and saying that she should be dismissed.