The warning from the leader of the United Arab Emirates, which lacked specific details about the nature of an attack, never reached the chiefs of Israel’s security establishment, Israeli officials said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Tel Aviv this month. Credit...

Ariel Schalit/Associated Press Sept. 25, 2026, 11:24 a.m. ET As Israelis prepare to vote next month, the question of who bears responsibility for failing to prevent the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023 has become a dominant issue in one of Israel’s most consequential campaigns in history. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking an unprecedented seventh term, has placed the blame on national security officials, while his critics have said he must personally answer for the failures. When Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported earlier this month that Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, had given Mr. Netanyahu a secret warning that Hamas was planning a major attack, the question took on even greater urgency. Mr. Netanyahu has denied the report.

But a person who said they had spoken with Sheikh Mohammed and another person who said they had been briefed by someone on the call between the two leaders told The New York Times that the Emirati leader had secretly reported to Mr. Netanyahu that Hamas was considering a major attack. The warning from the Emirati leader, however, never reached the leaders of Israel’s security establishment, according to five former senior Israeli officials. Mr. Netanyahu gathered his security chiefs days later, on Oct. 1, 2023, for a meeting about the situation in the Gaza Strip, and never mentioned the warning, according to minutes of the meeting reviewed by The Times. Image Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, in Berlin this month.

Instead, he told them that the goal should be to maintain calm in Gaza, and he pushed back when some security officials said that Israel should consider military strikes against senior Hamas leaders in Gaza who were overseeing attacks against Israelis in the West Bank, the minutes show. At the meeting, details of which have not been previously reported, Mr. Netanyahu said that any Israeli action in Gaza might sabotage the prospect of Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel — a deal the Israeli prime minister believed was imminent. Sheikh Mohammed had called Mr. Netanyahu in late September to tell him that, based on information he had received, Hamas was planning to launch an attack, according to the two people who said they had spoken with someone on the call.

One of those people said the information was not specific about whether Hamas was planning to launch rockets into Israel or preparing for a ground invasion over the border. The original sources of the intelligence that Sheikh Mohammed passed to Mr. Netanyahu are unclear, and it is also unclear whether other issues were discussed on their call. The warning, though vague, proved to be correct.

Days later, thousands of Hamas fighters and their allies launched an invasion over the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 more hostage in the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s history. Image Israeli soldiers checked body bags while collecting the remains of people killed at Kfar Azza, a kibbutz near the border with Gaza, during the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. After the Haaretz report, Mr. Netanyahu denied in a statement that he had ever received a phone call warning from Sheikh Mohammed and said that if any intelligence came from the Emiratis it was passed to Israel through intelligence channels.

The Emirati foreign ministry and Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to requests for comment. But Sheikh Mohammed mentioned his September 2023 phone call with Mr. Netanyahu months later in a discussion with William Burns, the C. I.

A. director at the time, according to a person familiar with that discussion. Sheikh Mohammed tol...