Netanyahu’s rivals call him ‘unfit’ for office after report he was warned of October 7 attack

Jerusalem: Israeli opposition politicians said on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the October 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials.

The report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz , which The New York Times could not confirm, said that Netanyahu had a 45-minute phone call with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Emirati president, in late September 2023, and was told about a plan by Hamas to attack Israel and destabilise the region. Netanyahu’s office has denied the report.

Netanyahu was said to have been unfazed by the revelations, responding that Israel was prepared for any scenario, according to the report.

In a statement on Tuesday, Netanyahu’s office said that he had not been personally warned by the Emirati president. “No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates,” it said. “If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”

The Emirati Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it did not comment on “media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders”. It added that the Emirati and Israeli governments had “open and direct lines of communication” and that “all relevant intelligence” was transmitted between them.

The report that Netanyahu may not have been responsive to warnings about the attacks landed at a particularly sensitive time for him and Israel. National elections are planned for late October, and Netanyahu’s chances of being re-elected are not assured .

The questions about what the Israeli prime minister had been told, by whom and when in the period leading to the Hamas-led assault have become hot-button election issues in a deeply polarised country.

Netanyahu has sought to present himself as the only politician positioned to ensure Israel’s security. He has seemed to shift blame onto others for the October 7 assault, the single deadliest day in Israel’s history, in which about 1200 people were killed and 250 others taken hostage to the Gaza Strip.

Recently, Netanyahu asserted that Israeli security officials had chosen not to wake him up in the early hours of October 7, despite worrying signs from Gaza because they had feared he would respond aggressively and set off a war with Hamas.

“If they had woken me up, everything would have looked different,” he said in a campaign video clip last month.

But when Netanyahu’s office released a schedule of his actions, after he was awakened at 6.29am that day, when the Hamas assault began, it appeared that he had not ordered an immediate counterattack and that hours had passed before he spoke to the military chief of staff.

Ultimately, the Israeli military response in Gaza destroyed much of the enclave, led to widespread privation and displacement of Palestinians and killed more than 70,000 people, including tens of thousands of civilians, Palestinian officials said.

Netanyahu’s political challengers have characterised his far-right government and its policies as risks to Israel’s future, pointing to the country’s international isolation since the war in Gaza and the increased chaos in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where violence by extremist settlers has become rampant.

These challengers cited the report on Tuesday as evidence that Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, had become a liability.

The leaders of four Israeli opposition political parties called in a joint statement on Tuesday for an independent commission to investigate the 2023 attack after the elections. “The public in Israel deserves to know what happened before, during and after the Oct. 7 massacre,” they wrote.

Many Israelis had long called for an independent commission to investigate official failures that might have led to the attack, but Netanyahu had resisted. When he finally agreed early this year to an investigating commission, he proposed a process that deviated from Israeli law for independent inquiries.

The opposition politicians cited a “series” of revelations about Netanyahu’s actions and what they described as failures to act leading up to the attacks that have undermined faith in his leadership and government, and his claims that he is the key to Israel’s security.

“Netanyahu and his partners in the Oct. 7 government are unfit to continue in office,” the opposition leaders wrote. “We will work in coordination and with the required responsibility to prevent them from leading to another disaster.”

Netanyahu is trailing in the polls, and his primary rival, Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff, leads him in polling when respondents are asked how much they trust each candidate on security matters.

Eisenkot, who heads a relatively new party, has accused Netanyahu of prioritising his political survival over the interests of Israel.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

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