Hendra Wijaya
Benjamin Netanyahu is facing renewed scrutiny over allegations that he received advance warnings of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks, with the controversy threatening to overshadow his re-election bid as Israelis prepare to vote on October 27.
The latest development came on Sunday, when a Wall Street Journal report indicated that Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, personally telephoned the Israeli prime minister just days before the assault. According to the report, the call reinforced earlier warnings delivered in September 2023, when Kamel is said to have traveled to Israel to alert security officials in person that Hamas was preparing an attack.
The Egyptian warnings are not the only ones that have surfaced in recent weeks. Reports in both Israeli and American media earlier this month suggested that United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, commonly known as MBZ, had cautioned Netanyahu in the week before the attack that Hamas’s then-leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning the assault.
Netanyahu has consistently and emphatically denied receiving any warning of the impending attack. He has taken legal action against outlets that published the claims, including a lawsuit against the Israeli newspaper Haaretz over its reporting on the alleged UAE warning. Neither Kamel nor the Egyptian government has publicly commented on the reports, while the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said it does not discuss media reports or speculation about conversations between government leaders.
The Israeli prime minister has sought to redirect responsibility for the intelligence failure onto Ronen Bar, the former head of Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet. On Monday, Bar announced that he would sue Netanyahu for defamation, describing the prime minister as a longtime political adversary. The move escalates an already bitter personal and political feud between the two men.
Polling indicates that the events surrounding October 7, which killed 1,139 people in Israel, along with questions about who bears responsibility for the security failures that preceded the attack, remain significant concerns for voters ahead of the parliamentary elections. Sustained media coverage has kept the trauma of that day at the center of public debate, more than three years after Israel launched its devastating war on Gaza, which has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians.
Ahron Bregman, an Israeli security analyst and senior teaching fellow at King’s College London, said the record now appears clear. “We know that Egypt’s Chief of Intelligence flew to Israel on September 26 and warned Israel of a … Hamas attack,” he said. “We also know that similar messages came from MBZ.”
Bregman attributed the failure to act on those warnings to what Israeli security circles call ha-conceptzia — the underlying assumptions that shape decision-making. “Israel, not only Netanyahu, believed in the conception that Hamas was deterred and all it wanted was to [push] Israel a little bit to ease the pressure and blockade on Gaza,” he explained. That mindset, he suggested, led officials to dismiss or downplay the incoming intelligence.
Netanyahu’s two main rivals in the race for prime minister have both seized on the allegations. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who leads the Beyachad (Together) alliance, said that if the claims are proven true, Netanyahu “cannot continue to serve in his position for another minute.” Former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar party leads Netanyahu’s Likud by the narrowest of margins in the polls, was equally blunt: “Netanyahu received dozens of warnings for October 7 and ignored them all. He is unfit.”
Despite the gravity of the allegations, the reports do not appear to have significantly shifted the election polls so far. Nevertheless, the latest revelations in The Wall Street Journal are likely to alarm those within Netanyahu’s campaign who have already invested considerable time and resources in shaping the prime minister’s public narrative.
The story also highlights the delicate role of regional mediators and allies. Egypt has long served as a broker between Israel and Hamas, while the UAE normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. If confirmed, the warnings from both countries would raise uncomfortable questions about how Israel’s leadership treated intelligence from partners who had gone out of their way to deliver it.
For voters, the core issue is accountability. The October 7 attacks exposed profound failures in Israel’s military and intelligence establishment, and the public has yet to receive a full official accounting of what went wrong. With the election just weeks away, Netanyahu’s attempts to shift blame, his legal battles with critics, and the mounting testimony of foreign warnings are all converging into a single, politically explosive question: what did the prime minister know, and when did he know it?
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