By Adam Rasgon, Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/world/middleeast/netanyahu-warning-oct-7-uae.html

Sept. 25, 2026

As Israelis prepare to vote next month, the question of who bears responsibility for failing to prevent the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023 has become a dominant issue in one of Israel’s most consequential campaigns in history.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking an unprecedented seventh term, has placed the blame on national security officials, while his critics have said he must personally answer for the failures. When Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported earlier this month that Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, had given Mr. Netanyahu a secret warning that Hamas was planning a major attack, the question took on even greater urgency.

Mr. Netanyahu has denied the report.

But a person who said they had spoken with Sheikh Mohammed and another person who said they had been briefed by someone on the call between the two leaders told The New York Times that the Emirati leader had secretly reported to Mr. Netanyahu that Hamas was considering a major attack.

The warning from the Emirati leader, however, never reached the leaders of Israel’s security establishment, according to five former senior Israeli officials. Mr. Netanyahu gathered his security chiefs days later, on Oct. 1, 2023, for a meeting about the situation in the Gaza Strip, and never mentioned the warning, according to minutes of the meeting reviewed by The Times.

Instead, he told them that the goal should be to maintain calm in Gaza, and he pushed back when some security officials said that Israel should consider military strikes against senior Hamas leaders in Gaza who were overseeing attacks against Israelis in the West Bank, the minutes show.

At the meeting, details of which have not been previously reported, Mr. Netanyahu said that any Israeli action in Gaza might sabotage the prospect of Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel — a deal the Israeli prime minister believed was imminent.

Sheikh Mohammed had called Mr. Netanyahu in late September to tell him that, based on information he had received, Hamas was planning to launch an attack, according to the two people who said they had spoken with someone on the call. One of those people said the information was not specific about whether Hamas was planning to launch rockets into Israel or preparing for a ground invasion over the border. The original sources of the intelligence that Sheikh Mohammed passed to Mr. Netanyahu are unclear, and it is also unclear whether other issues were discussed on their call.

The warning, though vague, proved to be correct. Days later, thousands of Hamas fighters and their allies launched an invasion over the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 more hostage in the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s history.

After the Haaretz report, Mr. Netanyahu denied in a statement that he had ever received a phone call warning from Sheikh Mohammed and said that if any intelligence came from the Emiratis it was passed to Israel through intelligence channels. (If his mouth is open, Bibi is lying—Nass)

The Emirati foreign ministry and Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

But Sheikh Mohammed mentioned his September 2023 phone call with Mr. Netanyahu months later in a discussion with William Burns, the C.I.A. director at the time, according to a person familiar with that discussion. Sheikh Mohammed told Mr. Burns that, during the phone call, he had spoken to Mr. Netanyahu about a looming threat of violence in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip carried out by Hamas.

All of the people The New York Times spoke to insisted on anonymity to divulge details of sensitive discussions.

Mr. Netanyahu was not the only Israeli leader to overlook warning signs in the lead-up to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Israeli security leaders repeatedly downplayed other signs that Hamas was gearing up for an assault, which were abundant at the time.

The Israeli military even obtained a Hamas battle plan in 2022, but military leaders dismissed it as unrealistic. The plan, which the military gave the code name “Jericho Wall,” turned out to be the blueprint for the Oct. 7 attacks.

In the years before the attacks, Israeli military and intelligence officials had concluded that Hamas was incapable of carrying out a major attack on Israel, and that Yahya Sinwar, the group’s leader in the Gaza Strip, was more interested in governing the enclave than fighting another war with Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu thought that Israel had deterred Hamas from waging war, according to an Israeli state ombudsman report about government decision-making before the October attack. He instructed Israeli military and intelligence bodies to pursue a policy of “postponing conflicts” and “preserving Hamas as an effective, restrained, and restraining governing authority,” the report said. (WTF??? While simultaneously Netanyahu was working on IMEC (to rebuild Gaza into a Mediterranean resort, transportation and data hub) and a potential new Ben Gurion canal, a competitor to the Suez Canal, that would run adjacent to northern Gaza, or perhaps through it. Though if the Houthis control the red Sea, the canal would not be of much value.—Nass)

The phone call and the warning from Sheikh Mohammed are not mentioned in any of the internal investigations conducted by the military, intelligence agencies or other entities into the causes of the severe Israeli security failures leading up to and including Oct. 7, according to the five former senior Israeli officials. The five officials were involved in the assessments, which have not been released in full.

Late next month, Israelis will vote in their first national election since the Oct. 7 attacks, and the race for parliamentary seats in the highly polarized country is shaping to be extremely tight. Not only is Mr. Netanyahu’s political future at stake, many Israelis see the election as fateful for the future of their shaken country.

The Haaretz report punched a hole in Mr. Netanyahu’s argument that Israel’s military and intelligence services were to blame for the intelligence failures leading to the Oct. 7 attacks. He (Netanyahu) and his allies have blocked efforts by Israeli lawmakers to set up a state commission of inquiry into the security breakdowns that preceded the attacks, saying it would not uncover the truth.

Earlier this month, Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents in the campaign issued a joint statement saying that the Haaretz report about the September 2023 warning “joins a series of revelations concerning Netanyahu’s failures” and “once again underscores why Netanyahu is fighting for his life — to thwart the establishment of a state commission of inquiry and to thwart revealing the truth to the Israeli public.”

The call from Sheikh Mohammed to Mr. Netanyahu was a sign of the close security ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, which have grown deeper over the years. In 2020, Israel and the Emirates agreed to normalize relations, in a deal known as the Abraham Accords. The arrangement strengthened economic, political and security relations between the two nations, which share intelligence and view Islamist groups, including Hamas, with hostility.

Relations between Israel and the Emirates soured after the Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s ensuing war with Hamas, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, left much of Gaza in ruins and created a humanitarian crisis. Mr. Netanyahu and his Emirati counterparts took divergent views on the administration of Gaza and potential Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

In the years before the Oct. 7 attack, Mr. Sinwar, the Hamas leader, orchestrated a sophisticated campaign of deception that convinced Israeli politicians, generals and intelligence officials that Hamas had been deterred from waging war against Israel and was focused instead on governance.

Mr. Netanyahu was also eager for calm in Gaza, as it allowed him to focus on Iran and its proxy militia in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which he considered to be far greater threats than Hamas.

Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting to this article.

Adam Rasgon is a reporter for The Times in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 26, 2026, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Netanyahu Reportedly Was Given a Warning On the Hamas Attack.

Addendum: From the Sept. 26 Ha’aretz:

As reported earlier this month by Haaretz, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed leader did in fact warn PM Netanyahu of a “major attack” by Hamas shortly before October 7, 2023, two sources, including a person who spoke directly with the Emirati leader, told The New York Times. Netanyahu has denied such a conversation took place.

The Times report comes a day after a former senior Palestinian official told an Egyptian media channel that he met with Israeli intelligence officials weeks before the Hamas onslaught after conveying a warning from Hamas’ leader in Gaza that he was about to “put cards on the table that will cause an earthquake.”

“They told me, ‘You know that no one in Israel’s security services will sleep tonight, right?’” Sufian Abu Zaidarecalled in the interview, adding that his Israeli contacts sought to understand what “cards” Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar intended to put on the table and what he meant by an “earthquake.”

Earlier this month, Haaretz revealed that then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar briefed Netanyahu on the meeting with Abu Zaida on September 15. Two days later, senior defense figures held an urgent discussion on Sinwar’s threat which ended without concrete decisions.

A week after that, on September 26, Egypt’s then-intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, reportedly came to Israel to deliver a warning that Hamas was preparing for something big. According to a report in The Atlantic, which cites Israeli, Egyptian, Arab, U.S. and European officials briefed on Kamel’s visit, he recommended that the Israelis grant Hamas economic concessions to prevent a confrontation. It is unclear with whom Kamel met during his brief visit, the report said.

Meanwhile, in a wide-ranging interview with the right-wing Israeli weekly Makor Rishon, Netanyahu likened filmmakers Yuval Avraham and Rachel Szor’s production of the film “NAZA” to launching “dozens of ballistic missiles” at Israel, adding that “if you don’t revoke citizenship over this, what would you revoke it over?”

“NAZA” is based on testimonies from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel and examines what its official synopsis describes as systems behind Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Earlier this month, Netanyahu said that he will introduce a law that would revoke the citizenship of anyone who defames IDF soldiers, and a separate bill that “would hit them in the pocket by increasing twentyfold the amount in damages for which they can be sued for defamation.”

IDF reportedly shells southern Lebanon a day after PM calls for Israeli withdrawal

Despite a U.S.-brokered cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, the IDF reportedly shelled areas of southern Lebanon throughout Saturday, a day after Lebanese PM Nawaf Salam called for the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from his country.

Speaking before the UN General Assembly in New York, Salaam said that Lebanon did not want to be drawn into regional conflicts or used as a bargaining chip, stressing that the state must have sole authority over weapons and decisions of war and peace.

His speech followed an Iranian proposal on Thursday to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume talks on its nuclear program within seven days if the U.S. lifts its naval blockade, waives sanctions on Tehran’s oil sales and observes a truce that would include Lebanon.

(Did Israel restart its bombing of Lebanon to put the kibbosh to that proposal?—Nass)

IPAK-EDU is grateful to Meryl’s CHAOS letter (Critical Health Analysis and OpinionS) as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More