Former U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken denied a report from Haaretz that he had refused an offer to secure the immediate release of Israeli hostages, whom Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7.
The Israeli outlet claimed in an article published on Tuesday that Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told Blinken just hours after the attack began that Hamas was willing to release all of the “civilian” hostages immediately and that Blinken rebuffed the offer.
The top U.S. diplomat preferred to wait until he could travel to Israel days later, according to the report.
“For the record, this is false,” Blinken wrote on Wednesday in response to a social media post about the article. “Complete fiction.”
It’s not clear if Blinken was saying that the story was false in whole or in part. JNS sought comment from Blinken.
The Haaretz article is based on a forthcoming book, “Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment,” that purports to offer bombshell revelations about Oct. 7, including that the leader of the United Arab Emirates gave forewarning of the attacks to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It also claims that Netanyahu failed to pass that warning along to Israeli intelligence and that both Israel and the United States ignored early offers from Hamas to secure the immediate release of hostages.
The article relies on anonymous and frequently unclear sourcing, attributing direct quotations to figures like Blinken and the Qatari prime minister without reporting who heard the conversations.
Netanyahu published a statement from Likud on Wednesday claiming that the primary source for the article was Mohammed Dahlan, a former Fatah party leader who lives in the United Arab Emirates.
“Dahlan established a joint list with Hamas for the elections in the Palestinian Authority,” Likud stated. “He is interested in toppling the right-wing government led by Netanyahu, because he dreams of taking control of the Gaza Strip.”
“To do so, he needs a weak left-wing government,” it stated. “Such a government would withdraw from Gaza and hand it over to his control.”
Likud said that it would demand a criminal investigation of the article’s authors for “suspicion of attempting to disrupt the elections with foreign entities” and called the article “fake news.”
Blinken’s denial of the Haaretz report on Wednesday follows a similar statement from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office on Tuesday that rejected the article’s other claims.
“The press reports are false. No warning was given to the prime minister from the United Arab Emirates before Oct. 7,” the prime minister stated.
“If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries,” he added.
