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HomeRead, Watch, ListenIsrael
Israel Hamas WarFeatureIsrael

New evidence Netanyahu was warned about October 7

An explosive report that Netanyahu ignored a warning before October 7 helps explain why his election campaign is embracing conspiracy theories
Shahar Burla
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Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu during the funeral of Israeli hostage Ran Gvili, the last hostage whose remains were brought back from Gaza, on January 28, 2026 (Chaim Goldberg/ POOL/ AFP via Getty Images)

Published: 9 September 2026

Last updated: 9 September 2026

October 7 is Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political vulnerability. His conduct before and during the attack presents his opponents with a powerful election argument: Netanyahu led Israel while Hamas prepared its assault, ignored warnings about the consequences of Israel’s internal divisions and then presided over the country’s worst security failure.

That vulnerability has deepened following a major new report by Haaretz that Netanyahu received a personal warning from United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed about 10 days before the massacre. According to the report, bin Zayed told Netanyahu that Hamas was preparing a major operation that could cause extensive bloodshed and destabilise the region. Netanyahu allegedly dismissed the warning, failed to pass it to Israel’s security chiefs and took no action. The Prime Minister’s Office has called the report “a total lie” and denies that the conversation occurred.

The revelation, based on close anonymous sources, is politically explosive. Netanyahu’s emerging defence is built around the claim that the security establishment kept him in the dark. The Haaretz report suggests the opposite: that Netanyahu personally received significant information and failed to share it with the officials he now accuses of withholding warnings from him.

For nearly two years, Netanyahu and Likud have been preparing their response. Rather than simply arguing that the military and intelligence agencies failed, they have cultivated conspiracy theories that shift responsibility to “the generals”, the security establishment and the so-called “deep state”.

All are branches of one false and malicious blood libel: October 7 was not a systemic collapse but a plot to overthrow Netanyahu. According to this narrative, senior officials knew an attack was coming yet deliberately withheld the information because they feared Netanyahu would order a pre-emptive strike.

In other words: not failure but intent; not a misconception but conspiracy and revolt. The greater the evidence that warnings reached Netanyahu, the stronger his political need to redirect attention towards what the generals allegedly concealed, and away from what he knew, misunderstood or failed to do.

If security chiefs recognised that an assault was imminent and deliberately concealed it to prevent Netanyahu from acting, that would be revolt and betrayal, not ordinary failure.

If, on the other hand, Netanyahu was warned but failed to pass the message onto the security chiefs, then the Prime Minister failed to protect Israel from the October 7 attack.

Three conspiracy theories, one political purpose

With the election campaign, three overlapping narratives have developed to direct responsibility away from Netanyahu.

The first is “betrayal from within”: Israelis knew about the attack, opened the border or assisted Hamas. Versions have targeted protest groups, southern residents and political opponents. Many have collapsed under scrutiny, making this theory risky for Likud.

The second claims that reservists’ threats to refuse service during the judicial overhaul encouraged Yahya Sinwar to attack. This claim is also dangerous for Netanyahu because he received warnings that the judicial overhaul and resulting social rupture were harming deterrence. If internal division influenced Hamas, responsibility returns to the prime minister who refused to change course. This theory is also undermined by Hamas intelligence, which reportedly concluded in July 2023 that the protests had not significantly damaged Israel’s readiness and warned that an attack would provoke overwhelming retaliation.

The third, the “generals’ revolt”, is the most useful to Netanyahu. It alleges that security officials deliberately kept Netanyahu uninformed. This transforms the man who led Israel while Hamas prepared October 7 into the victim of an unaccountable elite. It also creates a heroic counterfactual: if only Netanyahu had been awakened, he would have prevented the catastrophe.

The ‘generals’ revolt’ enters the election

The claim that security officials were to blame for October 7 has become a widespread narrative of Likud's election campaign, centred on Erez Tadmor’s book The Generals’ Revolt, adapted into a four-part Channel 14 series. An analysis by Ronen Bergman found the phrase “generals’ revolt” was uttered 267 times on Channel 14 over 46 broadcast days, including 131 times in panels and interviews outside the series. The word “coup” appeared in 71 segments.

The use of the term “generals” (aluf in Hebrew) is designed to invoke not a professional rank but a junta surrounding the presidential palace. The label has been attached to disputes involving the Shin Bet chief, police commissioner, Supreme Court, appointments and leak investigations.

The pressure on Netanyahu to divert attention from his own culpability increased this week with new revelations of his prior knowledge

Last week Sara Netanyahu raised the stakes in an interview on Channel 14, where she effectively accused former IDF deputy chief of staff Yair Golan of prior knowledge of the attack, saying, “You claim you were fighting on October 7. You were already there early in the morning, already dressed and ready, at a very, very early hour, when others did not know, such as the prime minister.”

Golan, now leader of the Democrats, travelled south after learning of the attack, entered the area of the Nova music festival massacre and rescued survivors. Golan says he left for the south at about 8am, around 90 minutes after the attack began. He responded to Sara Netanyahu by threatening legal action and demanding a retraction, an apology and a donation to Nova survivors.

Sara Netanyahu's comments represent an escalation of a campaign under construction since October 7. Her son Yair has previously suggested that “treason” preceded the attack.

Netanyahu himself has been more cautious, saying there was a grave intelligence failure but “no treason”. But he has gradually developed a subtext that disagreement becomes insubordination and oversight becomes a coup.

In October 2023, he posted, and quickly deleted, a statement insisting that he had not been warned and that security chiefs had assured him Hamas was deterred. Later came claims about activated Hamas SIM cards, questions about why the Air Force was not ordered to attack and the repeated assertion that nobody woke him.

In February 2026, Netanyahu shared Tadmor’s allegation that then-Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar had treated him as an illegitimate prime minister and appointed himself Israel’s de facto leader on the night of the massacre.

Netanyahu later claimed that the “generals’” decided “not to anger Hamas, not to wake me and not to strike pre-emptively”. When controversy erupted over his wife’s interview, he too shifted blame towards the “generals” but again insisted it was “failure, not betrayal”.

The warning Netanyahu ignored

The pressure on Netanyahu to divert attention from his own culpability increased this week with new revelations of his prior knowledge. A Haaretz investigation, based on the book Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, reveals UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed called Netanyahu in late September 2023, only 10 days before the attack, to pass on a warning that an attack was imminent.

The warning had reportedly originated with Sinwar, who allegedly told a Fatah interlocutor that he was preparing a “huge surprise” if prisoner negotiations did not progress. The information eventually reached the Shin Bet and bin Zayed. Israeli security officials considered the warning but did not interpret it as indicating an imminent invasion from Gaza.

Concerned by the response, bin Zayed allegedly raised it directly with Netanyahu during a 45-minute call. Netanyahu reportedly said Israel understood the situation, believed Hamas action was more likely in the West Bank and was prepared for every scenario.

The image of a decisive leader who would have instantly overruled the generals at 3am is difficult to reconcile with his conduct after 6.29am

Netanyahu allegedly did not tell the heads of the IDF or Shin Bet. On October 1, Bar, the head of Shin Bet, reportedly proposed proactive action against Hamas, including targeting senior leaders. Netanyahu made no decision and apparently did not mention bin Zayed’s warning. A senior Shin Bet official told Haaretz that knowing about it might have changed the agency’s assessment.

The report does not establish that Netanyahu could have prevented October 7, and his office categorically denies the call occurred. But it challenges the mythology of a prime minister who would have acted decisively if only officials had informed him. It raises a more damaging possibility: that a foreign leader warned Netanyahu, but he neither acted nor ensured the information reached security chiefs.

What Oct 7 reveals

A newly detailed account of the prime minister’s actions on the morning of October 7 undermines the narrative that security officials deliberately concealed information from Netanyahu. From around 2am, Netanyahu’s intelligence officer received information about the warning signs and the assessments explaining them.

At approximately 3.50am, Military Intelligence called to confirm the material had been received. It was also transmitted to the National Security Council’s operations room, which sits inside the Prime Minister’s Office.

This does not prove Netanyahu personally saw it or eliminate questions about whether his military secretary should have been contacted. But the security establishment sent the information to Netanyahu’s office through two channels. If officials intended to conceal it, sending it there twice would have been an extraordinary way to execute the plot.

Netanyahu received his first call from military secretary Avi Gil at 6.29am as the attack began. A second call over the secure telephone system took place at 6.40am.

His campaign prefers to debate what he might have done had he been awakened at 3am. Netanyahu claims he would have immediately activated the Air Force, mobilised the military and closed the border.

The more important question is what he did after being informed. Netanyahu did not hold his first formal security consultation until close to 10am. Even then, he largely accepted the recommendations of the military leadership and defence minister. The image of a decisive leader who would have instantly overruled the generals at 3am is difficult to reconcile with his conduct after 6.29am.

This is why October 7 remains Netanyahu’s soft spot, and why the conspiracy campaign will intensify before the election. It redirects attention from his record, turns institutional failure into intentional revolt and places Netanyahu outside the system whose collapse occurred under his leadership.

A State Commission of Inquiry could replace insinuation with evidence and determine responsibility across government and the security establishment. Netanyahu’s refusal to establish one leaves the battlefield open.

The coming campaign will therefore be fought not only over who failed on October 7, but over whether Israelis remember the massacre as a national and systemic catastrophe, or accept the malicious fiction that it was a political plot against Benjamin Netanyahu.

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About the author

Shahar Burla

Shahar Burla

Dr Shahar Burla is a Sydney-based researcher, lecturer and Contributing Editor of TJI. Shahar holds a Master’s degree in political science from Hebrew University and a PhD in political science from Bar-Ilan University. He is the author of Political Imagination in the Diaspora: The Construction of a Pro-Israeli Narrative (2013) and co-editor of Australia and Israel: A Diasporic, Cultural and Political Relationship (2015).

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Comments2

  • Avatar of Carina Carlsson

    Carina Carlsson9 September at 08:05 am

    Who has benefited from the fact that Hamas’s attacks could be carried out? I am convinced that Netanyahu deliberately sacrificed Israeli lives for the chance to annihilate Gaza.

  • Avatar of Mark Ian

    Mark Ian9 September at 12:38 am

    There are denials about this warning but if they can be proven in the age of misinformation it would look grave for Netanyahu.
    The fact remains that nearly everyone from the Government The IDF the investigative journalists did not expect the massive attack by Hamas or believed the Technological Fence would delay an invasion in time for Armed Defenders to block massacres .
    Nevertheless Israel recovered showing great courage resiliency and brilliance and Netanyahu was the Leader as was the Chief of Staff Halevi and the Shin Bet Leader Ron Bar .
    They did resign after some victories were secured though ruthless as regards Gaza Civilians
    Included in the victories were the destruction of the Hezbollah ballistic missiles and the Iranian enriched Uranium with the help of the USA .
    The Hezbollah Leadership were wiped out as where the main Hamas planners and perpetrators of the Barbaric Massacre of October 7 2023 .
    A Unity of Eisenkot Bennett Lapid and Netanyahu is possible with a Rotation Netanyahu from July 2028 .