Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now facing another allegation that he had advanced knowledge of the terror attacks carried out in Gaza on October 7, 2023. It comes after his fiery speech at the United Nations on Thursday (September 24).
According to reports, Netanyahu was contacted secretly by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates in late September 2023. Sheikh Mohammad told the prime minister that Hamas was planning to launch a major attack on Israeli soil. There was no concrete plan of attack described. Netanyahu has denied receiving the message.
But a second person who spoke to Sheikh Mohammad and another person briefed on the call made to Netanyahu confirmed the information given to the Israeli leader. They shared their knowledge of the call with The New York Times.
According to five former senior Israeli officials, Netanyahu called his security chiefs together for a meeting on October 1, 2023 to discuss the situation in the Gaza Strip. But he never mentioned the warning to the security officers, instead focusing on maintaining calm in Gaza and expressing a need to avoid conflict so as not to jeopardize a potential deal with Saudi Arabia.
Further reporting showed that Netanyahu wasn’t too confident that Hamas had a solid strategy to pull off such an attack, despite Israeli intelligence obtaining a battle plan from Hamas in 2022. That plan, nicknamed “Jericho Wall”, turned out to be the precise blueprint for the terror group’s attack on October 7 that led to 1,200 people being killed and 250 being taken hostage in the deadliest attack in the nation’s history.
The news comes as Netanyahu is being besieged by critics in Israel who have questioned why his government has blocked lawmakers’ attempts to make official inquiries before elections in late October. The prime minister has blamed the October 7 attacks on failures by Israel’s security forces in the past.
Netanyahu has also been defiant against those who have called for him to be arrested on charges of genocide, in accordance with the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in November 2024. One of those voices is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who threatened to arrest him if he attended the UN General Assembly this week but had to back off after acknowledging he didn’t have the authority.