At a secret meeting with the president of the United Arab Emirates, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked him to deny reports that the UAE had warned Israel of an impending attack by Hamas in November 2023. The AP reported this, citing two people familiar with the details of the meeting.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

The Israeli prime minister made a secret visit to the United Arab Emirates, where he met with the country’s president, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The Israeli television channel Kan was the first to report on the trip, but the reasons for the visit had remained unknown until now.

According to the AP, the meeting lasted about an hour, and the Prime Minister’s request was the sole topic of discussion.

The scandal surrounding the warning to the UAE leader arose after the publication of an article in the newspaper *Haaretz*, which claimed that, after receiving information from Sheikh bin Zayed about an impending militant attack, Mr. Netanyahu failed to pass this information on to the intelligence services. The prime minister rejected these accusations and promised to sue the newspaper. UAE officials did not comment on the report.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Egyptian authorities warned Mr. Netanyahu three times about the impending attack, but he ignored these warnings.

The crux of the dispute surrounding the warning about the October 7 attack is whether the information reached the political leadership through official channels. Typically, such discussions between the Israeli prime minister and the UAE president take place through an Emirati representative equipped with a special encryption device and are documented. However, an audit by the Prime Minister’s Office found neither a recording of the conversation between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Zayed nor any record of such a representative’s visit.

At the same time, Israeli military and intelligence agencies had detailed information about Hamas’s attack plan more than a year before October 7. Israeli officials considered this scenario too complex and ambitious to be feasible, so the availability of this information did not lead to the threat being recognized as real.

The Israeli commission described what happened not as a result of a lack of data, but rather as the accumulation of a large body of intelligence that was not subject to a professional and thorough assessment. Meanwhile, the UAE and Israel maintain direct channels of communication and, when necessary, exchange intelligence, which separates the question of the specific route of the warning from the question of the Israeli services’ ability to interpret it correctly.