UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed allegedly warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Hamas was planning a major offensive in Israel just days before the militant group launched its attack on 7 October 2023, Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz claimed on Tuesday.
Haaretz reported that at the end of September 2023 — 10 days before the attack — the UAE president spoke with Netanyahu for 45 minutes and said the leader of Hamas in Gaza at the time Yahya Sinwar was planning a major operation.
The newspaper reported that Bin Zayed told Netanyahu that the attack would lead to bloodshed and could destabilise the region and undermine the Abraham Accords, the normalisation agreements between Israel and several Arab and Muslim-majority nations.
The Haaretz report claims Netanyahu “reacted with relative calm” and assured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario and a possible attack was more likely to come from the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu’s office called the report by the left-leaning newspaper “an absolute lie” and denied he spoke to the Emirati leader at that time.
The Haaretz newspaper based its report on a new book, “Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment,” by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval in which they investigate the circumstances and intelligence failures of the 7 October attacks.
Election campaign heating up
The revelations come at a time when Israel’s election campaign is heating up for the vote next month, and Netanyahu’s actions around the time of the 7 October attack are a key issue in the campaign.
Israel’s opposition leaders immediately launched a series of scathing attacks on Netanyahu, culminating in a joint statement calling for an investigation.
“The Israeli public is entitled to know: What did Netanyahu know, when did he know, why he didn’t update the security establishment, and why he didn’t act to protect Israeli civilians?” the joint statement by Naftali Bennett, Gadi Eisenkot, Yair Golan and Avigdor Lieberman said.
“Netanyahu bears personal and direct responsibility for the failure that led to the deaths of thousands of Israelis on his watch,” Bennett, who leads the B’Yachad party, said.
Eisenkot, a former chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defence Forces and a rival to Netanyahu in the upcoming legislative elections, had earlier said the Israeli leader “received dozens of warnings for 7 October and ignored them all.”
“He is unfit for office,” he added in a post on X.
In a video address, Golan, the leader of the Democrats party, also accused Netanyahu of “endangering Israel” and “leading us to disaster.”
“You knew, you ignored, you failed, you are to blame, Netanyahu. The excuses are over,” he said.
Netanyahu’s office denied the report’s veracity on Tuesday evening.
“The press reports are false. No warning was given to the prime minister from the United Arab Emirates before 7 October,” the office said in a statement, while adding it was possible the two countries exchanged messages through intelligence channels.
The UAE’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday it would not comment on the Israeli media report.
In a statement, the ministry said “the UAE government does not comment on media stories or speculation.”
“When necessary, all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated between the relevant entities.”
‘Basic strategic failure’
Former Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy told Euronews that the 7 October attacks were a “strategic failure” on Israel’s part.
“If this report is true, it’s hard to say why he wouldn’t pass that on, other than that he didn’t think it was credible. And that’s because Netanyahu was really convinced that Hamas was deterred,” Levy said.
“It was a basic strategic failure to understand the nature of the enemy facing Israel, its true intentions and its real capabilities”.
Israelis are due to head to the polls on 27 October for a national election to determine the 120-seat Knesset (parliament).
On election day, voters are asked to choose a political party and its list of candidates, rather than choosing individual candidates directly.
Asked about the Haaretz report’s impact on Netanyahu’s chances in the elections, Levy told Euronews that it was “too early” to rule him out, but that the vote would ultimately be about “responsibility for 7 October.”
Netanyahu has so far rejected multiple calls for an official government inquiry into the events surrounding the 7 October attack following other accusations of his handling of the crisis.
During the surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage, triggering the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza that ended in a US-brokered peace deal in October 2025.
Israel’s offensive resulted in the deaths of more than 73,600 Palestinians in the Strip, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures do not distinguish civilians and combatants.
The United Nations considers the ministry’s figures reliable, and Israeli officials have since stated that the numbers are broadly accurate.
Hundreds of Israelis, mostly soldiers, have been killed in continued fighting in wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.