Recent reporting by Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, drawn from a book he wrote with Ruth Yuval, has revived a question that haunts Israel: What did the country know before Oct. 7, 2023?
According to Eldar’s account, in early September of that year, when talks over the return of bodies and captives in Gaza in exchange for prisoners in Israel stalled, Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar summoned an intermediary and told him to warn the Israelis of a big surprise if there was no progress. He used the Arabic word zilzal, meaning “earthquake.”
The intermediary, former Palestinian Authority minister Sufian Abu Zaida, has since identified himself publicly. In a second meeting in mid-September, Sinwar allegedly asked whether the message had been passed on. Told it hadn’t, he repeated it, calling it a terrifying operation.
Abu Zaida and an adviser to the leader of the United Arab Emirates, reading Sinwar’s tone and body language, concluded that Sinwar meant a full-scale war. UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed then reportedly called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The message reportedly reached the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) on Sept. 15, and senior defense officials held a security assessment two days later without reaching decisions.
My analysis does not weigh the categorical denials from Netanyahu or his minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, who, as the official responsible at the time for maintaining direct contact with Gulf leadership, would have been on the call or received a summary of it. Nor do I include the UAE spokesman’s refusal to confirm or deny that the conversation took place, saying that such security matters are not discussed at the leadership level. I rely exclusively on logic and probability.
For years, Sinwar worked to persuade Israel that Hamas wanted quiet and economic relief for Gaza, not war. Israel granted work permits to thousands of Gazans and came to believe that Hamas was deterred. Hamas went as far as staying out of the August 2022 and May 2023 flare-ups with Islamic Jihad to reinforce that view. It was a long, patient deception by a man with a reputation as a cold calculator who spent two decades in Israeli prisons studying his adversary.
Sinwar also reportedly declined to coordinate the attack with Hezbollah and Iran, giving up the benefit of a coordinated multi-front assault, for fear that the plan would leak to Israel. A leader who sacrifices strategic advantage to protect secrecy does not casually hint at such a plan.
Then there is the UAE call. The report describes it as a 45-minute call in the final days of September. Heads of state don’t spend that long warning a prime minister over a hunch or a weak threat, so if the call happened, the message must have sounded grave to the people who conveyed it. But the reported gravity of the call comes from the same chain of interpreters who reconstructed events after the Oct. 7 massacre.
So, here are some plausible scenarios:
A deliberate warning that the Oct. 7 attack was coming. It’s extremely unlikely. It gains Sinwar nothing since the attack itself would win far more prisoner releases than any threat. And it risks the operation through heightened surveillance, canceled leave for soldiers or preemption. In addition, being close to launching the attack made the challenge greater, not smaller.
An outburst of rage. This is also very unlikely. It requires a poker player who fooled Israel for years to lose his composure days before the attack he had spent so long preparing. The account also describes persistence, not a flash of anger: He checked whether the message had been delivered and repeated it.
A calibrated, ambiguous threat. This is plausible, though not very likely. True, a vague, conditional threat tied to stalled talks would fit the image of a bargaining, not aggressive actor. The Israeli assessment of the warning could have been that Sinwar was seeking additional leverage in the negotiations. If Sinwar expected that reading, his intention might have been to reinforce his cover. For comparison, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s repeated threats before the 1973 Yom Kippur War arguably taught Israel to see such talk as mere bluster—which it was not. On the other hand, once again, it could have cost Sinwar the very valuable and studiously built element of surprise.
A message that took on meaning only in hindsight. This is also plausible, but not likely. After Oct 7, almost any threat from a hardliner looks prophetic. The intermediaries’ reading of Sinwar’s tone and body language comes from people who now know how the story ended.
So, the claim that Sinwar knowingly telegraphed the attack seems to collapse under the weight of his own interests. The outburst-of-rage explanation fails for the same reason. What survives is a narrower story, in which some ambiguous, conditional message was passed along and later became a warning. Even that leaves open the question of why Sinwar would take any risks at all.
Abu Zaida has promised more details, and they may change the picture. Until then, the report that Netanyahu was forewarned about the Oct. 7 attack should be viewed with a very healthy dose of skepticism.
