Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced intense political backlash on Tuesday over reports that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president had warned of a major Hamas operation days before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
The Prime Minister’s Office dismissed the report as a “complete lie.” But with less than two months until Israel’s October elections, Netanyahu’s rivals have seized on it as the latest evidence of a growing list of warnings he has ignored.
Leaders of the four opposition parties, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Liberman and Yair Golan, issued an unprecedented joint statement calling for an “immediate and thorough investigation” into Netanyahu’s “failures and dysfunction”.
“The Israeli people have a right to know: what did Prime Minister Netanyahu know, when did he know it, why did he not update the security system, and why did he not take action to protect Israeli civilians?” the statement said.
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote in X that the report was “true” and that Netanyahu’s alleged disregard for the warning amounted to “criminal negligence.” Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, a political ally of Mr. Bennett, said that Mr. Bennett had publicly warned the attack before it happened, as had Israeli security officials and Egyptian officials. “If Prime Minister Netanyahu had played his role, the massacre could have been prevented,” Lapid said in a statement.
The report, published in Haaretz newspaper, is based on the findings of a forthcoming book by Israeli journalists Shlomi Erdal and Ruti Yuval. The newspaper said UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed called Prime Minister Netanyahu about 10 days before October 7 and warned him during a 45-minute call that Hamas’ Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar was planning major actions against Israel that could cause bloodshed and destabilize the region. The report cited a message sent by Sinwar to the UAE and Israel through Palestinian intermediaries in mid-September 2023 warning of a coming “earthquake.”
Haaretz newspaper reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted “relatively calmly” to the information and assured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario.
The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement on Tuesday evening saying it “does not comment on media reports or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders” but did not deny the call. “All relevant information has been and will continue to be communicated between the relevant parties as necessary,” the statement said.
Israeli sources familiar with the matter said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office tried to get the UAE to deny the Haaretz report, but the UAE only agreed to issue a statement on information sharing.
The prime minister’s office strongly denied the report, saying that Netanyahu “did not speak with the President of the United Arab Emirates during the period in question and did not receive any warning from him.”
Erdal, one of the journalists who supported the report, insisted that Prime Minister Netanyahu had denied the report.
“That’s true,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I worked on this report for almost a year and a half,” he said.
“I have the documents, I have the records, I have everything that shows that the UAE president called Prime Minister Netanyahu a week and a half before October 7 and warned him that Yahya Sinwar was planning a major attack on Israel,” Erdal said.
Bombshell report reveals Prime Minister Netanyahu was warned days before October 7th
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing growing political backlash over reports that the UAE president had warned of a major Hamas operation days before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. CNN’s Oren Lieberman reported.
The report comes as Netanyahu’s rivals work to hold him accountable for the October 7 attack, the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, which killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250 in Gaza, making it a central issue of the campaign.
Prime Minister Netanyahu now outranks almost all of Israel’s security leaders from that time. Since the attack, the defense minister, army chief of staff, and military intelligence chiefs of Mossad and Shin Bet have all resigned, been fired, or reached the end of their terms.
Gadi Eisenkot, who is currently polling as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s likely challenger, said the Haaretz report showed that Netanyahu had “blindly led Israel” towards the failure of October 7 and renewed his pledge to establish a national commission of inquiry if elected.
Nearly three years after the attack, Prime Minister Netanyahu has resisted calls from families and survivors of October 7 to set up an independent commission to investigate the security and intelligence failures that enabled Hamas to carry out its operation.
He and his allies promoted a tone that blamed security chiefs for not waking him up the night before the attack, despite intelligence signals that a Hamas attack was imminent.
Last month, Sara Golan, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s wife, suggested that Yair Golan, a retired major general and leader of the leftist Democratic Party who independently rushed to the Gaza border on October 7 to rescue survivors, may have known about the attack in advance.
In an interview with the pro-government Channel 14, she questioned why Mr Golan was “already dressed and ready to head south” at dawn that day, “while others, including the prime minister, knew nothing”.
Prime Minister Golan demanded an apology for what he called a “vile conspiracy theory” and said he would file a defamation lawsuit, saying the allegations were part of Netanyahu’s attempt to “rewrite” the events of October 7 and avoid responsibility.
In response to the Haaretz report, Golan wrote to X that the prime minister’s “not waking him up excuse is over. He knew, he was warned.” He called it “not an error in judgment, but a conscious and criminal abandonment.”
Hours later, the Democratic Party intensified its campaign against Prime Minister Netanyahu, erecting giant billboards on Tel Aviv’s main roads with the headline: “1,200 Murder File – Deaths due to Negligence.”
