Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told lawyers to begin defamation proceedings against an Israeli newspaper over reports that the leader of the United Arab Emirates warned him that Hamas was planning an operation just days before the 7 October 2023 attacks.
According to book extracts published by Haaretz, UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan had a phone call with Netanyahu that September.
The report said Netanyahu was warned that the then-Hamas chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation.
Netanyahu’s office said “no warning was given to the prime minister from the United Arab Emirates before 7 October”, calling the report part of a “sinister plot”.
Haaretz, which has historically been a vocal critic of the prime minister, has stood by its reporting and rejected Netanyahu’s defamation claim, saying its “sole purpose is to silence journalistic criticism”.
The report – and Netanyahu’s angry denials, accusing Haaretz of lies – comes as the general election campaign in Israel starts to heat up. The polls on 27 October are widely considered a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership.
On 7 October 2023, thousands of Hamas-led gunmen breached the Gaza border fence and attacked nearby Israeli communities, military bases and a large music festival. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken back to Gaza as hostages.
Israel responded by launching a military campaign in Gaza, during which at least 73,670 people have been killed, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.
Ever since 7 October, accusations have been laid against Netanyahu that he did not act quickly enough after the attack began. He has resisted an independent public inquiry into what happened and this latest report will only fuel critics’ suspicions.
The report, published on Tuesday, cited three “foreign senior sources” and a Palestinian adviser to Sheikh Mohammed as saying that, in the final days of September 2023, a representative from the UAE embassy went to the Israeli prime minister’s office with a special phone to ensure the conversation would remain confidential.
During that call, Haaretz reported, Netanyahu was given an explicit warning by Sheikh Mohammed – that Sinwar had told a former Palestinian official that Hamas was preparing a major operation that he described as an “earthquake”.
“Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilise the entire region,” Haaretz said, adding that the information contained in its report was a result of extensive research of dozens of sources, documents and correspondence, all carried out for a book, Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment, written by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval.
“To his surprise however, the prime minister reacted with relative calm,” Haaretz reported. “Netanyahu said that, in his assessment, Hamas intended to operate in the West Bank area, and he reassured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario.”
The report went on to recount that the Emirati leader relayed the conversation he had with Netanyahu to the then CIA director William J Burns. It also said Netanyahu failed to brief the heads of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency and Mossad intelligence agency, as well as the Israeli army’s chief of staff about his conversation with the UAE president.
The report was published on the same day that the UK announced sanctions on illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The decision angered the Israeli government, which announced several countermeasures, including ordering the closure of the British consulate in occupied East Jerusalem.
But while that development made international headlines, it was the Haaretz story that led the news in a country getting ready for elections.
Netanyahu’s Likud Party accused Haaretz of “blatant foreign interference in Israel’s elections”, while the prime minister said on X that the story had “clear political timing, as part of the left’s election campaign”.
Lawyers for Haaretz responded to Netanyahu’s plans to begin legal proceedings, saying they would not be deterred by what they described as the prime minister’s attempts to silence journalistic criticism.
The lawyers’ letter stated that the report was “the product of an in-depth journalistic investigations and is based on sources pertaining to an issue of paramount public importance”.
“In the absence of a full accountability to the public on behalf of your client, the press fulfils its role and exposes step by step the information to the public,” it added.
While the UAE has not addressed the conversation specifically, it did not deny it either, issuing a statement emphasising that, since the attack by Hamas, it has worked towards de-escalation, regional stability and preventing violence.
“UAE and Israeli government entities have maintained open and direct lines of communication since the inception of the relationship more than five years ago,” the UAE’s ministry of foreign affairs said in a statement after the publication of Haaretz’s report. “When necessary, all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated between the relevant entities.”
Four of Israel’s main opposition leaders issued a joint statement demanding an investigation into what happened.
“Netanyahu and his partners in the 7 October government are unfit to continue in office,” said Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman and Yair Golan.
“We will work with the co-ordination and responsibility required to prevent them from leading to another disaster.”
