Netanyahu's Oct. 7 Reckoning

The story so far

As of September 28, 2026

This story is now about a specific warning at the very top and what was done with it. A newly published book describes a secure, 45-minute phone call about ten days before October 7, 2023, in which United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was preparing a major attack that would cause mass casualties and shake the region. The book says Netanyahu did not pass that warning to Israel’s senior security chiefs. Netanyahu’s office calls this an absolute lie and says there was no such call and no warning. Over the weekend, Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi and met bin Zayed on Sunday to ask him to deny that he issued such a warning.

The warning did not come out of nowhere. In the months before the attack, Israeli officials were in secret contacts with Hamas over a limited prisoner release and a quiet-for-quiet arrangement for Gaza. Those talks stalled as final approval was delayed at the political level. Sinwar then sent messages through a Palestinian intermediary that an earthquake was coming if progress did not resume. The intermediary relayed the threat to the UAE, and the UAE leader pressed Netanyahu directly. Israeli security officials discussed elements of these warnings but did not treat them as a signal of an imminent assault from Gaza. On October 1, Israel’s internal security chief proposed preemptive steps; no decision followed. Six days later, Hamas’s assault left about 1,200 people dead in Israel and 251 people taken into Gaza.

What is at stake now is accountability and the chain of responsibility. If an explicit foreign warning reached the prime minister and was not shared or acted upon, the failure narrows from a diffuse institutional miss to a decision point in one office. That would also place prewar political calculations, including the handling of the prisoner deal, inside the causal story of how October 7 became possible. Netanyahu’s denial sets up a binary that an inquiry can test: either the call and warnings occurred as described, or they did not.

Israeli politics has moved to match that question. Opposition figures have demanded an immediate investigation, and Netanyahu’s chief rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, is casting the election as a judgment on whether political survival was put ahead of security. The UAE dimension now turns on a direct appeal from Netanyahu to Mohammed bin Zayed to repudiate the warning claim, making the Emirati leader’s account a hinge for the record. The facts that now explain the others are simple and verifiable if records and witnesses are examined: whether the secure call took place, who was briefed afterward, what instructions were given, and why proposed preemptive actions in early October were not approved.