An article published in Israel’s Haaretz daily newspaper on September 8 confirmed what many Israelis had suspected since the Hamas military-style attack on October 7, 2023, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had received advanced warning of a coming attack, but had failed to act. The shocking story in Haaretz was excerpted from a book written by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, “Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment,” which states that Mohammad bin Zayed (MbZ), the President of the United Arab Emirates, called Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu in late September to warn him that Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, was planning an attack.
They reported that Netanyahu failed to notify his top security officials, implying at a minimum extreme negligence on his part. This report was coherent with an earlier report which accused the Prime Minister of taking more than two hours to come to his office after being notified of the attack on October 7. The still-unanswered question is whether his failure to act was deliberate, to justify the ethnic cleansing and related war crimes committed in response to October 7.
The filing of the story triggered a furious response from Netanyahu. “It’s a fabrication,” he exclaimed. Some Israeli media backed up the PM, and there were charges that the story was treasonous. With an election coming on October 27, Netanyahu’s defenders were in overheated damage-control mode, clinging to hopes that the polls were right, showing that most Israelis still believed that the genocidal attacks on Palestinians by the present regime were necessary to protect the population from the alleged upsurge in global anti-semitism.
More details emerged of the call from MbZ in the New York Times on September 25, as well as in a report in the Times of Israel. Among the new details was a report that Abbas Kamel, an Egyptian intelligence official, communicated a warning of an attack from Sinwar to Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, but Netanyahu rejected acting on the report.
Other charges against Netanyahu personally surfaced on September 15, when family members of victims of the Oct. 7 attacks released a dossier which they said documents claims that the Hamas attack was the result of a pattern of fifteen years of “intelligence and operational failures.” Netanyahu had been Prime Minister through most of that period. The report concluded by citing the failure to act on MBZ’s call as the most recently revealed example of these failures.
Adding to Netanyahu’s siege mentality was the release of the film NAZA by Israeli filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham. NAZA is an acronym for “collateral damage,” and includes interviews with twenty-four soldiers and intelligence personnel who spoke anonymously of the use of artificial intelligence in targeting, in order to determine what level of civilian casualties would result from bombing the homes of a Hamas member. One soldier admitted, “We are killing these children intentionally.”
Netanyahu reacted again with unhinged fury, seconding the demand that the filmmakers be punished. “We’re fighting worldwide anti-semitic incitement,” he charged, “but when it comes from within us, it’s intolerable.” Mickey Zahor, the Minister of Culture, threatened to revoke the citizenship of the filmmakers, whose previous effort, No Other Land, won an Academy Award in 2024 for best documentary foreign film, about systemic settler violence against a Palestinian village in the West Bank. He accused them of being “willing to harm their homeland just to get applause from anti-semites,” calling it an “inconceivable...betrayal of the state.”
