Netanyahu moves to sue Haaretz over reported Emirati warning before October 7

Haaretz published on Tuesday, September 8 a report by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval stating that Benjamin Netanyahu took a telephone call from UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed before the October 7, 2023 attack in which, over 45 minutes, MBZ urged Israel to take seriously threats of an “earthquake” from then-Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and that Netanyahu never relayed the message to the security establishment. The paper’s September 9 editorial, headlined “Netanyahu Knew,” said the full Eldar–Yuval investigation “will appear in Haaretz’s Friday edition” and called the story the exposure of Netanyahu’s “biggest lie.” On Wednesday the Prime Minister’s Office said he had instructed his lawyers to sue and sent Haaretz a warning letter naming the paper and both reporters — the procedural step before a libel action. Netanyahu, quoted by the Jewish Chronicle, called the report “a malicious fabrication with clear political timing, as part of the left’s election campaign.”

Read closely, the denial does not cover the ground the story occupies. The PMO statement carried by Israel Hayom says “no conversation whatsoever took place between the prime minister and the president of the UAE from the start of September until October 7” — a window that leaves August 2023 and earlier untouched. The evidentiary rebuttal quoted by the Jerusalem Post concerns “records of entries into the Prime Minister’s Office” showing no “entry of the Emirati representative”; that answers a meeting, not the call Haaretz alleges. The reporting is itself unsettled on timing: Haaretz’s own Haaretz Today column says “days before” the attack, the Jewish Chronicle places the warning in September 2023. Netanyahu also called for a criminal investigation into the report, an item that appears in the Times of Israel’s September 9 liveblog; the addressee of that demand is not established. Former defense minister Yoav Gallant is listed in the same liveblog as saying he did not know of the alleged warning and that Netanyahu could have hidden it from him.

Assessment: What has run so far is a trailer; the version that can be argued with lands Friday, inside the campaign. Judge it on one question: does it produce a document, a log or a named official, or does it rest on recollection? Two things are load-bearing and both are missing. Abu Dhabi has said nothing on the record that surfaced anywhere — and Abu Dhabi has every incentive to say nothing, since confirming a private warning to Netanyahu would advertise both its channel to Hamas’s calculations and its willingness to use it. Note the sequence: on September 1 Netanyahu claimed officials deliberately did not wake him before the attack. A warning he received himself cuts across that defence. A libel suit sets the clock on that argument past October 27.