The revelation by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval about an alleged warning relayed to Israel, and especially to Netanyahu, through the United Arab Emirates in September 2023 — that Yahya Sinwar and Hamas were planning a major attack on Israel — and ignored by Benjamin Netanyahu should surprise no one. We have already seen how Netanyahu and his admirers continue to hide behind the excuse that “they didn’t wake him” on the night of October 6-7, while ignoring all the indications that had piled up on his desk in the weeks and months before the attack.
But far beyond that, they deliberately ignore serious actions taken by the prime minister that effectively helped Hamas advance its plans for the October 7 attack. We can continue to wallow in the question of whether he was woken up or not and debate the nature of the warnings he received, but the bottom line is this: Benjamin Netanyahu and the governments he led turned Hamas into an asset. They made the preservation of Hamas rule in Gaza a priority to ensure that the Palestinian Authority would not gain a foothold there or grow stronger.
Mohammed bin Zayed, Yahya Sinwar, Benjamin Netanyahu
(Photo: AP, Alex Kolomoisky)
Netanyahu was the one who decided, beginning in 2018, to allow the transfer of Qatari funds to Hamas, totaling $360 million a year in cash. And even after the defense establishment warned him that the mechanism for transferring Qatari money into Gaza was not working properly and that funds were reaching Hamas’ military wing, he continued to ignore the warnings and push for the money to be transferred.
His people can continue to argue that then-IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot backed the policy in 2018. That is true. But the man at the top of the system, who pushed for it more than anyone else, was Netanyahu. And the man who continued the policy even when he knew the money was being used to build tunnels and manufacture rockets was Bibi.
But Netanyahu’s grave responsibility for October 7 does not end with the Qatari money. Time and again, beginning in January 2023, warnings were placed on his desk about the possibility of war breaking out with one of Israel’s enemies. Netanyahu ignored them.
The way Israel was perceived in the wake of the deep divisions created by the judicial overhaul — and just a reminder for anyone who has forgotten: the overhaul came before the protests on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street, meaning that if the overhaul had been halted, there would have been no Kaplan protests — led Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to believe Israel was growing weaker.
Bibi publicly dismissed those warnings as exaggerated, even in front of television cameras. Later, when the Shin Bet under Ronen Bar — yes, the same Ronen Bar whom Likud members and Netanyahu supporters have turned into a traitor and an enemy of the people — warned him in August, September and even on Oct. 1, 2023, that Sinwar was growing bolder and that action had to be taken against him, including assassinating senior figures and targeting Hamas’ top leadership, Netanyahu once again ignored the warnings. He continued transferring money into Gaza and allowing workers from the Strip into Israel.
Netanyahu missed every opportunity that might have helped stop Hamas’ October 7 attack. One can only speculate what would have happened had Israel initiated strikes against Hamas targets during the Sukkot holiday, including senior Hamas figures who were directing terror attacks in the West Bank from their bases in Gaza.
The Shin Bet warned, even before the Jewish holiday season had ended, that Gaza was going to explode in Israel’s face because Sinwar was neither deterred nor afraid. Netanyahu simply ignored it.
And now, with the story published by Eldar and Yuval, it appears Netanyahu did what he knows best: ignore it. He barreled ahead with the judicial overhaul and refused to budge an inch. At the time, the defense establishment was already discussing the possibility of an escalation by Hamas in Gaza in light of warnings similar in nature to those described by Eldar and Yuval — warnings coming from the direction of the UAE and from Palestinian advisers who knew Gaza and Sinwar well.
In other words, there was a serious discussion of a similar warning that had reached Israel, and Netanyahu knew about it.
But Eldar and Yuval’s report that Netanyahu chose to keep the defense establishment, the Shin Bet and the IDF out of the loop, and did not even pass along the substance of the warning he had received from Mohammed bin Zayed — even if its wording was more cautious or less unequivocal — shows just how badly Bibi failed and how much responsibility he must bear for his negligent actions before October 7.
Israel’s great failure was not merely an intelligence failure or a military failure. Above all, it was a political and strategic failure. A leader who made preserving Hamas rule in Gaza a policy, funded it and helped ensure its survival cannot remain in office.
Everyone involved at the military and intelligence levels has already left their posts and accepted responsibility for their failures. Yet the man who bears more responsibility than anyone else for what happened there — for the prevailing mindset, for the funding and for the assistance that helped Hamas — is the one who continues to go around saying, “But they didn’t wake me.”