The Israeli daily Haaretz published a big and consequential exposé today alleging that weeks before the October 7, 2023 massacres in southern Israel the head of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed, warned Prime Minister Netanyahu in a direct phone call lasting some 45 minutes that something big was coming from Hamas. For additional context, Israel holds elections on October 27 of this year. And as it has for the last three years, Netanyahu’s degree of responsibility for what happened remains a central question in the election. So while it’s not explicitly noted in the article, the electoral implications are clear. The investigation itself appears to be essentially an excerpt from a soon-to-be released book. So it’s not precisely a Haaretz story, more one that they’re publishing, though that’s fine print. The article is long and detailed and I think quite credible. But it’s paywalled. So I wanted to walk you through the key details and provide some general analysis.
It’s best to think of this piece as three separate revelations. The first is that — all according to this article — Israel and Hamas in 2023 were pretty close to finalizing a semi-normalization of the situation in Gaza in a longterm truce, or “hudna,” between Hamas and Israel. The details of this aren’t fully sketched out but basically an end to the blockade, freer commerce and travel through Israel and Egypt, etc. Second is the warning from MBZ in the weeks before the attack. Then, finally, it claims that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks Hamas, was willing to free most or all of the hostages, probably excluding military-aged men in or out of uniform, with few if any conditions.
The axis of the story is the relationship between revelations one and two. And to avoid too many qualifying clauses in this description below I will be asserting the claims of the article except where I say otherwise.
The central player here is Yahya Sinwar, the late leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. When Sinwar came to power in 2017 he brought a new militancy to the position and embarked on a program of greatly expanding and intensifying Hamas’ military capacity, including its tunnel system. He wanted to go to war with Israel. But in this he was also acutely aware of the fact that every time the Palestinians or Hamas had done so in the past, the actions had been decisively crushed by Israeli military might and intelligence. So while preparing for war and confrontation, he decided to also explore a deal that could qualitatively improve life for Palestinians living in the Strip. Those negotiations were very far along at the end of the summer of 2023. They bogged down when Prime Minister Netanyahu started dragging his feet on just how many and which Palestinian prisoners would be released as part of the deal.
The background here is that, notwithstanding Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a hawk and a war-monger on the left in the U.S., at least until 2023 his characteristic action was more kicking the can down the road. Biding his time, not committing himself. There were already a lot of clashes in the West Bank at the time and a major domestic political crisis in Israel over the “judicial coup,” which had brought the anti-Netanyahu opposition out on to the streets every week for almost a year. This all came after five successive elections which were indecisive and one of which took him out of power for a year before finally allowing him to create a narrow coalition relying heavily on the Israeli far right. So the general thrust of the article is some mix of Netanyahu having his hands full and doing his standard slow-rolling. He also probably wasn’t eager to agree to a deal that might put his coalition under strain.
Finally, Sinwar lost his patience with the process and cut off negotiations. This was in September. So like a month before the attacks. He must have had everything ready for an attack. But this would have been when he put the plan into motion. Intermediaries who had been working the Hudna negotiations got wind of something coming and Sinwar himself made a threat to one of these intermediaries and told him to get the message to Israel.
It’s a little hard to see the logic of this other than as an attempt to get Netanyahu back to the negotiations since the element of surprise was essential to the eventual attack’s success. Indeed, Sinwar seems to have said as much. Without the element of surprise it couldn’t work. So even these warnings were risky. The intermediary was uncertain and even afraid of what to do with the information, partly fearing that in conveying the message to Israel he might be held responsible for it. So he went to MBZ, the leader of the UAE. He was highly concerned about an attack that could lead to more or less what has happened over the last three years: a catastrophic attack on Israel, followed by horrific retaliation against Hamas in Gaza and leading to a regional war. He told the intermediary to get the message to the Israelis. He did that at the security and defense level. But the warnings were fairly vague and not much happened in response to the warnings. Netanyahu was briefed on the message and the meetings, as would be the norm.
A key backdrop to all of this is that Israel did not take Hamas seriously as a military threat. They took Hezbollah very seriously, as a de facto state/army. Hamas was different, basically a terrorist threat which could fire off homemade rockets and mount terrorist attacks, but not a true military threat. So I think it’s fair to say that when they heard Hamas was warning of something big they simply didn’t believe the scale they were later able to pull off. They apparently decided that Hamas would try to get possession of Israeli academic Elizabeth Tsurkov who had been kidnapped in Iraq and was being held hostage there. (She was eventually released in September 2025.) In any case, MBZ didn’t get the reaction he wanted. But he was also afraid that a more specific warning to the Israelis might prompt a massive preemptive attack on Hamas in Gaza. He wanted to know more. So he sent the intermediary back to find more details and to talk to Sinwar.
The intermediary talked again to Sinwar who gave a more direct and grave message. The intermediary and then MBZ got the message that some sort of catastrophic attack was planned. So MBZ made the decision to talk to Netanyahu directly. He conveyed all this in a 45 minute call between the two men. The kicker here is that Netanyahu did not brief any of his security or defense officials on this outreach. Of course they’d already gotten a version of the message. But the direct contact from a the leader of the UAE obviously showed a different level of urgency and gravity. The argument, and it’s a pretty good one, is that if Netanyahu had briefed the heads of Mossad, the Shin Bet and the IDF about this call they would have taken more aggressive protective measures.
To cite just one example, in the hours just before the October 7 attack, Israel saw something was happening in Gaza. Security officials met to evaluate it and they decided it was likely a drill and not to mobilize. Of course, it was not a drill. It was the beginning mobilization for the attack. These are all what ifs of course. But it does not seem implausible that if Netanyahu had briefed these officials on this warning that that conclusion arrived at in those overnight meetings might have been different and Israel could have had some level of military response in place when the attack started.
Finally, we have the possibility of a hostage release immediately after the attacks. Here this sounds quite plausible but I think this is an incomplete perspective and perhaps to an American audience misleading. Once the attack happened, all the regional leaders were desperately scrambling to stop what was coming. The government of Qatar threatened to expel Hamas from the country if they didn’t immediately release all the civilian hostages. (As I noted above, there’s some disagreement over the definitions of civilians: Hamas likely viewed all military age men and possibly everyone of military age as soldiers, whether currently in the IDF or not.) Hamas first agreed to release the civilian hostages with a number of conditions, essentially non-retaliation for the attacks and some changes to the status quo on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. This was a non-starter. Other players intervened and basically said no conditions. Just release them. Hamas then appears to have agreed to this, with perhaps some token conditions.
The response from Israel was there’s nothing to talk about. Then Mossad Director David Barnea told Prime Minister al-Thani of Qatar: “If they want to release the civilians, let them release them. We are not prepared to speak with Hamas.” The same message was passed through other channels.
The offer and the response are both extremely plausible. But I think it was basically inevitable. I’m not trying to litigate here what you or I or anyone else thinks makes sense or what would have been right. But at that moment about 1200 Israelis, the great majority civilians, had been killed. What was being proposed here was a release of most of the hostages and a return to some sort of negotiations. At that moment that was acceptable only to the tiniest fringe of Israeli public opinion. The verdict was that Israel had misjudged Hamas and fatally underestimated it and that the only solution was to destroy it as an organization and kill everyone who had been involved in the attack. So my point is I don’t think this revelation, if it is one, is a surprise. And I don’t think it’s either here or there in terms of it political ramifications within Israel. Because every other party and leader who is now at all contesting for power would have made the same decision.
The only slight caveat to that is that it became clear over time that Netanyahu’s government had no real interest or priority to seek the release of the hostages at all, even long after Israel had delivered that decisive and ferocious assault and killed tens of thousands of civilians along the way. Some of that lack of interest was the government’s hawkishness and desire for revenge. But it was also because at a basic level Netanyahu did not want to bring the war to a close because that would create perhaps-unstoppable pressure to hold new elections that he would almost certainly lose. (As it happens, he waited till the last possible legal date to hold a new election.) That fact may change some of the shading of this revelation. But I don’t think it changes that big picture.
And finally, does any of this matter for the upcoming election? I’m honestly not sure. I went around the Israeli papers and the story is getting reported though not necessarily with screaming headlines basically everywhere. By rights it should fundamentally discredit Netanyahu whose calling card has always been security and normalcy. But he’s already been discredited to anyone without an overwhelming personal or ideological commitment to supporting him. Whatever messages or warnings Netanyahu received in the weeks before October 7, the bigger story is that Netanyahu had been Prime Minister for the previous 14 years with only one short one year interruption in 2021 and 2022. All the policies, strategies and decisions were his — both in the moment and in the shaping of policy back to 2009. And it happened on his watch. Given that political context my best guess would be a moderate political hit if only because he’s already down to the hard core of the rightist camp. But I emphasize “guess.” I really don’t know.
