JERUSALEM - A slew of reports that Arab officials warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a serious threat emerging from Gaza days before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas have put the longtime Israeli leader on the defensive less than 30 days before a pivotal election.
Ever since the attack, the most deadly in Israel's history, Netanyahu has argued that Israeli security chiefs collectively failed to foresee the surprise attack by Hamas - but that he led the fightback, scoring redemptive battlefield victories in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
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But that narrative is fraying as reports of the advance warnings, including one delivered by United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, train a spotlight on Netanyahu's handling of the attack and his refusal to allow an independent commission to investigate it.
Netanyahu and his office have denied the reports, and his political party and supporters have accused "left-wing" Israeli officials, as well as journalists and overseas interests, of conspiring to oust him from office through a coordinated smear campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election.
The disclosures began to trickle out in early September, when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an excerpt from "Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment," a book by two Israeli journalists that details an encrypted call reportedly made by the Emirati president, who is known as MBZ, less than two weeks before Oct. 7, 2023, to warn Netanyahu that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major operation that could destabilize the Middle East. Netanyahu did not pass on the warnings to his security aides, according to the book authors, Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval.
"We have excellent proof and many more scoops in the book," Eldar said. "It's rock solid." The UAE Foreign Ministry did not deny the Haaretz excerpt, saying, "When necessary, all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated between the relevant entities."
In recent days, the debate in Israel has reached a fever pitch after the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal published reports that then-Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel also warned Netanyahu about Gaza in the days before Oct. 7.
On Sunday, Netanyahu flew to Abu Dhabi and requested that MBZ explicitly deny that a warning call about Oct. 7 took place in late 2023, said a person with knowledge of the meeting who, like others quoted in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Netanyahu's office denied that Netanyahu made such a request, calling it "fake news." When asked about the Sunday meeting, the UAE Foreign Ministry referred The Washington Post to a report by the official Emirates News Agency released late Monday saying the two leaders had discussed "bilateral relations and ways to strengthen ties." The ministry declined further comment.
Several senior Israeli officials, including the former army chief of staff and head of military intelligence, have resigned, saying they failed to protect the country.
Netanyahu, by contrast, has deflected responsibility and repeatedly accused his security chiefs of missing the threat from Gaza and even "deliberately" letting him sleep for four hours after Hamas began its assault on southern Israel at 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7.
On Monday, Ronen Bar, the former director of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence agency, sued Netanyahu for defamation, accusing the prime minister of "trying to deflect fire from himself by hurling accusations at the person who warned him in real time."
It's not immediately clear how the allegations will affect polls, which have held relatively steady in recent weeks and show former military chief Gadi Eisenkot's party narrowly leading Netanyahu's Likud. The reports, however, have dominated headlines and prime-time talk shows.
Several security branches, including the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet, have conducted internal probes into their failures to anticipate the Oct. 7 attack, but Netanyahu's government has refused to authorize one for itself.
Many of Netanyahu's campaign rivals, including Eisenkot, have pledged to immediately establish an independent commission of inquiry if elected.
Jonathan Rynhold, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, said Netanyahu may be hobbled by the claims about the warnings, but his loyal base and Israel's predominantly right-leaning voters may not jump ship for the centrist bloc led by Eisenkot without a "clear smoking gun."
"Oct. 7 has been on everybody's mind every day for three years, so it is relevant, but these claims have been bubbling for a long time in different forms," Rynhold said. "Imagine there's a video of all the Egyptians and the Emiratis and you can actually see him getting the warning and it was repeated 50 times on social media, then it becomes unavoidable. But obviously that's not what's going to happen."
Sufian Abu Zaida, a former Palestinian official who was the source of the warning that eventually reached the UAE, told The Post that he met Sinwar, the Hamas leader, in his Gaza City office in September 2023, and Sinwar dictated an offer to Israeli negotiators: he would release two Israeli soldiers and two civilians held in Gaza in exchange for Israel freeing Palestinian prisoners and lifting its heavy trade and movement restrictions imposed on the strip since 2007. Otherwise, Sinwar warned, there would be an "earthquake."
"The exact content of the message was: "We will put cards on the table, there will be an earthquake regarding the negotiations and we will empty the [Israeli] prisons [of Palestinians]," Abu Zaida recalled in an interview this week, adding that Sinwar told him to "make sure" the message reached the Israelis.
Abu Zaida said he passed the message to Shin Bet officials and also relayed it to an adviser to MBZ in Abu Dhabi - the Palestinian politician Mohammad Dahlan, who then informed the UAE president. Abu Zaida said he also passed the message to Samir al-Mashharawi, a Palestinian political leader and Dahlan associate based in Egypt.
The three Palestinian intermediaries "didn't know that Sinwar was ready to go ahead with his threats, or how and when," Abu Zaida said. "I was thinking that it might be about the West Bank: kidnapping a soldier from here or there for later negotiations with Israel for a prisoner exchange."
Several months after Oct. 7, in early 2024, MBZ recounted to then-CIA Director William J. Burns that he had warned Netanyahu about the possibility of violence erupting but did not include specific details that anticipated the Oct. 7 plot, a person familiar with the matter said.
The Emirates' refusal to disavow the reports of advance warnings is particularly striking because it is the Arab country that has stood closest to Netanyahu over the past three years even as his international standing plummeted.
Since signing the Abraham Accords that normalized diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020, the UAE has often been more measured in its criticism of Israel's conduct in Gaza and the West Bank than some other Arab countries that have accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
At other times, the UAE has taken a relatively tougher stance toward Israel's foes, such as Iran, and it has supported the U.S.-Israeli-led war.
Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, noted that Emirati officials have declined to hand Netanyahu a political favor by explicitly denying the reports of the warnings.
"The reality is that Netanyahu is a liability for the UAE right now," Vatanka said. "They are sensitive to their image in the Islamic world and don't want to be seen as too close with Netanyahu."
But, he added, the UAE is "not going to walk away from its relationship" with the state of Israel itself.
Back home, Netanyahu's supporters kicked into damage-control mode.
"As the elections approach, we are seeing a flood of false reports by mobilized left-wing journalists, aimed at toppling the right and installing a Left-Muslim Brotherhood government that will surrender on every front," the Likud Party said in a statement.
Amit Segal, a political commentator who is seen as close to Netanyahu, said there were "Arab nations" behind the "slanderous fabrications" and warned that if the Israeli right lost the elections, a Palestinian state would emerge.
"This is the election question: It is either the Right or Palestine," Segal posted on social media.
Eldar, the Israeli author, said Likud lawyers have threatened to sue him for defamation and accused him of seeking to influence the election. He said he first obtained information about the call almost two years ago and it took the publisher until this month to release the book.
"I would have preferred to publish it a year ago, but it took time," Eldar said.
One Israeli political consultant, who is not affiliated with a campaign in this election cycle and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve client relationships, said Netanyahu's campaign might find ways to benefit from the fallout of the new claims.
The controversy could draw attention away from the intense criticism Netanyahu has faced over his government's policy of allowing ultra-Orthodox Jews to forgo mandatory military service, and Netanyahu could instead focus attention on Oct. 7 and the danger posed by Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 21 percent of the Israeli population, the consultant said.
Polls show that to form a majority government, Eisenkot may need to join hands with the so-called Arab parties, which Netanyahu's campaign has frequently portrayed as security risks in campaign ads with racist undertones.
The furor over the pre-Oct. 7 warnings "seems negative, but it's also changed the narrative" in Israel, the consultant said. "Netanyahu can push aside the ultra-Orthodox issue and bring to the table the conversation about the fact that Gadi Eisenkot doesn't have a majority without the voice or fingers of the Arab parties."
Lior Soroka contributed to this report.