Netanyahu says he'll sue Haaretz over report that UAE warned him before October 7

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday he had instructed his lawyers to file a libel suit against the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a day after it reported that he received a personal warning from the president of the United Arab Emirates about an imminent Hamas assault roughly ten days before the October 7, 2023, attack, and did not relay it to Israel's security establishment. The newspaper said it stood by its reporting.

The report, published September 8 and drawn from a forthcoming book on the war titled "Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment" by Haaretz journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruti Yuval, said UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan called Netanyahu for roughly 45 minutes in late September 2023 and told him that Hamas's Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, was preparing what Sinwar himself had described to associates as "the mother of all surprises." According to the account, Netanyahu replied calmly, told the Emirati leader Israel was prepared, and privately believed any Hamas move would come in the West Bank rather than Gaza. Former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and former IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi both told Haaretz they were never briefed on the call.

What the account alleges

Eldar has defended the reporting in blunt terms since Netanyahu's office moved to discredit it. "I have the document, I have records, I have everything that shows that the president of the UAE called Netanyahu a week and a half before October 7 and gave him a warning that Yahya Sinwar is planning a major attack on Israel," he told CBS News, which detailed Netanyahu's response to the report, describing more than a year and a half of work on the investigation.

The United Arab Emirates' foreign ministry, in a statement distributed through its media hub, did not confirm or deny that the call took place, saying only that the government "does not comment on reports or speculations published in the media regarding conversations between government leaders." It added that Emirati and Israeli officials have maintained "open and direct channels of communication" since the two countries normalized relations under the Abraham Accords, and that "relevant intelligence information continues to be exchanged between the concerned parties" when necessary.

The numbers

The October 7, 2023, attack killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel and saw around 250 people taken hostage into Gaza, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust and the trigger for two years of war that continues to shape Israeli politics. Netanyahu's office says his lawyers are seeking a public retraction, a formal apology and one million shekels — roughly $270,000 — in damages from Haaretz and Eldar. The dispute lands 49 days before Israel's next general election, scheduled for October 27, the first Israeli election since 1988 to be held on its statutory date rather than called early.

Questions over what Israeli leaders knew before October 7, and when, have hung over Netanyahu's government since the earliest days of the war, driving mass protests and demands for a state commission of inquiry that his coalition has so far resisted. Successive reports over the past two years have detailed warnings that reached military and intelligence officers in the weeks and months before the attack; the new account is the first to place a direct, personal warning from a foreign head of state at Netanyahu's own desk, dismissed and unshared with the officials responsible for acting on it.

Denial and a lawsuit

Netanyahu's office rejected the account outright, saying a review of his call log and of entry records at the Prime Minister's Office, cross-checked with the National Security Council and the Military Secretariat, "does not show any entry of the Emirati representative into the Prime Minister's Office" and found no record of any call with bin Zayed between the start of September and October 7, 2023. The office called the report "a malicious fabrication with a clear political timing, as part of the left's election campaign," according to the Jerusalem Post's account of the lawsuit announcement.

The claim has become an immediate flashpoint in the election campaign. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, now an opposition candidate, wrote that he believed the Haaretz account and accused Netanyahu of "criminal negligence," saying the prime minister "bears personal and direct responsibility" for the deaths on October 7. Former defense minister and ex-IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot said Netanyahu "received dozens of warnings for October 7 and ignored them all," adding, "he is unfit," a reaction carried alongside the UAE's own response in an Abu Dhabi daily.

A press freedom warning

The lawsuit threat itself drew a rebuke from the International Federation of Journalists, which represents more than 600,000 journalists worldwide. Its general secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said in a federation statement urging Netanyahu to abandon the suit that libel actions of this kind against reporters constitute "an attack on press freedom and the public's right to know" and risk "increased intimidation, self-censorship and a chilling effect on journalistic investigations" into powerful figures.

"I have the document, I have records, I have everything that shows that the president of the UAE called Netanyahu a week and a half before October 7 and gave him a warning that Yahya Sinwar is planning a major attack on Israel."

What happens next

Netanyahu's office has not yet confirmed that the suit has been formally filed with an Israeli court, only that lawyers have been instructed to proceed; any filing would open a civil defamation case in which Haaretz's editors would be able to seek disclosure of the reporters' underlying documentation. Haaretz has said it stands fully behind Eldar and Yuval's reporting and is expected to contest any suit rather than retract, a position first laid out alongside the original account of the alleged warning. The UAE government's carefully hedged statement, declining either to confirm the call or deny that intelligence has flowed between the two countries, leaves the central factual dispute unresolved by any government on the record. With Israel's election five and a half weeks away, the competing accounts of who knew what before October 7 are likely to remain a live campaign issue regardless of how, or whether, the libel case proceeds.