Netanyahu says he will sue Haaretz over a reported UAE warning before 7 October

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday he would sue Haaretz and reporter Shlomi Eldar over a story that the president of the United Arab Emirates warned him, ten days before 7 October 2023, that Hamas was preparing a major attack. His lawyers have demanded that the paper take the article down, apologise and pay 1 million shekels. If it refuses, the letter says, the suit will seek more than 2.5 million shekels. Haaretz said it stands by the reporting.

The paper, drawing on a forthcoming book and on what it described as dozens of Israeli and foreign sources, recordings and documents, said Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan held a 45-minute call with Netanyahu in late September 2023. In that call, according to the account, the Emirati president said Yahya Sinwar was planning an operation that would spill blood, shake the region and put the Abraham Accords at risk. He asked Netanyahu to treat the warning as serious. Netanyahu, the paper said, replied that he thought Hamas meant to act in the West Bank and that Israel was ready for any scenario.

Former Shin Bet director Ronen Bar and then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi told Haaretz they were not informed of any such warning. A senior Shin Bet official quoted in the story said knowledge of it "could have changed our entire assessment picture." Four opposition leaders issued a joint call for an immediate investigation and said Netanyahu was unfit for office. Naftali Bennett, who is running against him and is known to be on friendly terms with bin Zayed, said the report was "true" without explaining how he knew.

The Prime Minister's Office denied that any personal warning came from the UAE. "No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates," it said. "If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries." On Wednesday Netanyahu went further. He said there was no conversation at all between him and the Emirati president from early September 2023 until 7 October. Staff had checked his call logs, National Security Council records and the military secretary's office, he said, and found nothing. They had also checked entry logs at the Prime Minister's Office and found no UAE envoy in that window. Eldar has said the warning was delivered in a call. Netanyahu's team says a call of that kind would have left a record.

Abu Dhabi's foreign ministry said it does not comment on media stories or speculation about conversations between leaders. An Emirati source familiar with the conversation later confirmed the Haaretz account to The Times of Israel. That confirmation, if accurate, sits against the Israeli log search. Either the call happened on a channel that does not appear in the logs the Prime Minister's Office searched, or the sources are wrong. The lawsuit is designed to force that question into a courtroom in the middle of an election campaign.

The political use is obvious. Israel is weeks from a vote. The 7 October failure is already the central charge against Netanyahu. A claim that a partner head of state warned him in person, and that he neither recorded the warning nor passed it to Bar and Halevi, is the hardest version of that charge. His answer is that the call did not occur and that the paper invented it. Haaretz has declined to retract. Bennett has declined to walk back his one-word endorsement.

What can be said with care is this. The UAE was, in 2023, a new signatory of the Abraham Accords and a state with its own picture of Hamas and of Iran. A warning from that capital, if it was given, would have been an unusual diplomatic act. A failure to brief the Shin Bet and the chief of staff, if that failure happened, would have been an unusual security act. The logs, the lawsuit and the sources now have to be tested against each other. Until they are, the public has two incompatible official stories and an election date.