JERUSALEM
The most consequential document in Israel's election campaign this week is not a manifesto or a poll. It is a phone log that, according to the Prime Minister's Office, contains nothing at all.
On Tuesday, Haaretz published an investigation drawn from a forthcoming book by two of its reporters alleging that Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, telephoned Benjamin Netanyahu in the final days of September 2023 — roughly ten days before the October 7 assault — and warned him that the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was preparing a major operation against Israel. The call, the report says, lasted about 45 minutes. Bin Zayed is described as fearing extensive bloodshed, regional destabilisation and damage to the Abraham Accords. Netanyahu, according to the account, responded relatively calmly, said he believed Hamas was more likely to act in the occupied West Bank, and assured him Israel was prepared for any scenario.
The allegation that has detonated in Israeli politics is not the call but what the report says did not follow it: that Netanyahu passed the warning to no one — not the head of the Shin Bet, not the Mossad chief, not the chief of the general staff. Within twenty-four hours the four leading opposition parties had jointly declared him unfit for office, the Emirati foreign ministry had issued a statement conspicuously declining to deny the conversation, and his lawyers had demanded a front-page retraction and money.
Background
October 7, 2023 remains the unresolved wound of Israeli public life. About 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 taken hostage into Gaza in the deadliest day in the country's history. The war that followed destroyed much of the enclave and, according to Palestinian officials, has killed more than 70,000 people. Almost three years on, Israel has still not held the kind of state commission of inquiry that followed every previous national catastrophe.
That absence is Netanyahu's doing. He resisted an independent commission for more than two years; when he finally conceded to an investigation this year, he proposed a mechanism departing from the statutory model in Israeli law, which critics said would let the government choose its own examiners. The military, the Shin Bet and the Mossad have each published internal reviews accepting institutional blame. The political level has published none.
Into that vacuum Netanyahu has advanced a counter-narrative: that the failure was the security establishment's and that he was kept in the dark. Officials chose not to wake him in the early hours of October 7, he has said, because they feared he would respond aggressively and trigger a war. "If they had woken me up, everything would have looked different," he said in a campaign video last month. That sat awkwardly with a timeline his own office later released, showing that after he was woken at 6:29 a.m. — as the assault was already under way — he did not order an immediate counter-attack, and hours passed before he spoke to the military chief of staff.
All of this is now electoral material. Israel votes on October 27, the first national election since the attack. Netanyahu is trailing. His principal challenger is Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of the general staff whose new party has drawn level with Likud at roughly 22 seats in polling averages — and who outpolls Netanyahu on which candidate voters trust on security, the ground on which Netanyahu has built forty years of political identity. Neither bloc is near the 61 seats needed to govern.
Key Developments
The investigation is credited to Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval and draws on their forthcoming book, reported as titled "Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment." Haaretz says it rests on dozens of sources in Israel and abroad, plus recordings, internal documents and correspondence; three senior foreign sources are cited for the call itself. The Associated Press and The New York Times have reported the investigation's existence but say they have not independently confirmed the conversation took place.
Netanyahu's denial is categorical and technical. His office said Tuesday: "No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates. If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries." On Wednesday he added that his office, the National Security Council and his military secretariat had examined records from the period and found no trace of the call. Because leader-level Israeli–Emirati calls are not conducted over Israeli systems, he said, an Emirati representative physically brings a dedicated encrypted device into the Prime Minister's Office for each one — and investigators found no record of such a visit. "There is no possibility of entering the Prime Minister's Office without documentation and registration by the security authorities on site," he said. Yedioth Ahronoth and the public broadcaster Kan corroborated that arrangement, describing a phone brought in, handed to Netanyahu and destroyed afterwards — which cuts both ways as evidence, since a procedure designed to leave no trace is a poor foundation for proving a negative.
Netanyahu's lawyer, Uriel Nizri, sent a pre-litigation notice on Wednesday to Haaretz and journalists Shlomi Eldar, Ruth Yuval and Uri Misgav, calling the report an "absolute fabrication" and demanding, within 72 hours, that it be deleted from the paper's website and the reporters' social accounts; that a correction run on the front page and as the site's lead headline, with wording approved by his attorneys; and that one million shekels (about $300,000) be paid as an out-of-court settlement. Failing that, he says he will sue for at least 2.5 million shekels (about $800,000) plus costs, arguing the report was published deliberately to influence the election. Haaretz says it stands by its reporting. Coverage of the sums has been inconsistent; they are two figures in the same letter.
Abu Dhabi's response was the pivot point. The Emirati foreign ministry said it does not comment on "media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders," adding that the two governments maintain "open and direct lines of communication" and that "when necessary, all relevant intelligence information has been, and continues to be, communicated between the relevant bodies." Kan called the statement ambiguous, noted it contained no explicit denial, and reported that Netanyahu had sought a denial and did not get one. Kan further reported that bin Zayed subsequently told several senior figures about the alleged call, and that some senior Israeli officials learned of it only from the Haaretz report.
Then on Wednesday Yedioth cited a senior Middle Eastern intelligence official, described as having detailed knowledge of the covert Israel–UAE relationship, as saying Abu Dhabi did pass Israel a warning about a possible "large and imminent operation" by Hamas shortly before the attack — from a very reliable source, indicating something could happen very soon but without a specific date. The official declined to say whether the intelligence named Sinwar, how it was transmitted, or whether bin Zayed telephoned Netanyahu personally. Yedioth said this corroborated at least part of the Haaretz report. That leaves a narrow but genuine gap between the versions: a warning through channels, which the Prime Minister's Office does not dispute, is a different political fact from a warning delivered leader-to-leader and then withheld from Israel's security chiefs.
Reactions
Eisenkot moved first and hardest, saying Netanyahu had led Israel "blindly to disaster" and was unfit to serve. He has built his campaign on the argument that the prime minister consistently prioritises political survival over the national interest, and the report handed him the cleanest illustration of that case he has had.
The leaders of four opposition parties then issued a rare joint statement calling for an independent commission of inquiry after the election. "The public in Israel deserves to know what happened before, during and after the October 7 massacre," they wrote. Citing a series of revelations about Netanyahu's actions and failures to act, they concluded: "Netanyahu and his partners in the October 7 government are unfit to continue in office. We will work in coordination and with the required responsibility to prevent them from leading to another disaster." The pledge to coordinate matters as much as the condemnation: Israeli coalition arithmetic punishes a fragmented opposition even when it wins more votes, and the statement is an attempt to pre-commit rivals to a single post-election path.
Netanyahu's allies counter that the timing is the story — a report published seven weeks before polling day, from an unpublished book, sourced to foreign officials who cannot be cross-examined, about a call whose alleged security architecture guarantees no documentary record. That is a serious argument, and it is not answered by pointing to the UAE's silence. It is also the argument of a government that has spent nearly three years preventing the one process — a statutory commission with subpoena power — that could settle the question.
What's Next
The 72-hour deadline expires this weekend. With Haaretz standing by the story, a defamation filing is the likely next step — which would put the prime minister in the position of litigating his own October 7 conduct in open court during an election campaign, in a forum with discovery. Israeli libel law places the burden on the defendant to prove truth or good-faith publication, which is why the threat is real; but a newspaper that says it holds recordings and documents may welcome the venue.
The second variable is Abu Dhabi. One sentence of explicit Emirati denial would end the story; a leak the other way would end something larger. The UAE has strong reasons to say nothing — the Abraham Accords are already under severe strain, and confirming that its president warned Netanyahu and was ignored would expose the limits of a relationship the Emirates have spent six years defending domestically. Silence is the cheapest option, but as Kan noted, it is not a neutral one.
Beyond the manoeuvring lies the question the opposition has now placed on the ballot: whether the October 7 accounting happens at all, and on whose terms. Netanyahu's campaign rests on the proposition that he remains the indispensable guarantor of Israeli security; every week the pre-attack record is relitigated erodes the premise rather than the man. With no bloc near 61 seats, the likeliest outcome on October 27 is a protracted coalition negotiation in which the inquiry itself becomes a bargaining chip. The disputed 45 minutes may never be documented. The fight over who gets to investigate them will be.
