Scandal: A series examining corruption in leadership and its downstream consequences.
About 10 days before Hamas launched the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, the president of the United Arab Emirates personally warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the group was preparing a major operation, according to an investigation published Tuesday by Haaretz.
The warning, delivered by President Mohamed bin Zayed during a roughly 45-minute phone call in late September 2023, was unusually explicit, Haaretz reported. Bin Zayed told Mr. Netanyahu that Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was preparing something large enough to cause bloodshed, destabilize the region and threaten the Abraham Accords, the 2020 normalization agreements that established diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office denied the account, calling it an “absolute lie” and saying that no such conversation with the Emirati leader took place during the period in question.
Hours after the Haaretz report appeared, however, an Emirati source familiar with the conversation confirmed to The Times of Israel that bin Zayed had called Mr. Netanyahu and warned him that Hamas was planning a major attack. The confirmation does not establish every detail reported by Haaretz, including the precise language used in the call or what Mr. Netanyahu did afterward.
The Haaretz investigation, by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, draws on research for a new book and cites three senior foreign sources familiar with the contents of the call, along with recordings, internal documents, correspondence and interviews with dozens of people in Israel and abroad.
President Isaac Herzog told Haaretz that bin Zayed had repeatedly conveyed concern in the months before the war that the situation needed to be defused and had sent a special envoy to meet Mr. Netanyahu.
