On Sunday morning, without notice, a private plane carried Benjamin Netanyahu out of Israel and into Abu Dhabi. Channel 12 broke the story while he was still on the ground. A day later both governments confirmed the meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, calling it a conversation about bilateral relations. The Israeli account gave the errand away. Netanyahu had gone to ask the Emirati president to deny publicly a report that he had telephoned Netanyahu days before 7 October 2023 to warn that Hamas was preparing a major assault.
A prime minister who wanted the record corrected would send a lawyer or a spokesman. This one flew across the Gulf in secret, a month before an election, to ask a foreign head of state to say a warning never happened. The method is the tell, and it points at everything the errand is meant to protect.
What October 7 opened is visible on the ground before it is visible anywhere else. By the reckoning of an Israeli newspaper, Israel has seized more territory from its neighbors since that day than in any comparable span in decades. The war did not stay in Gaza. It moved outward on every front where a border could be pushed.
In Gaza the army holds more than half the territory after the autumn ceasefire, and the plan for what remains was drawn up in Washington. A proposal built around Donald Trump would place the enclave under American trusteeship for at least a decade and rebuild it as a coastal resort on cleared land. Netanyahu’s cabinet approved the voluntary transfer of Gazans to third countries, and his defense minister ordered the army to prepare for a mass departure. A UN commission gave the campaign its legal name last September, finding that Israel had committed genocide and that its object was permanent control of Gaza and a Jewish majority across the land it holds. Israel rejects the finding. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over the conduct of the war, which his office calls false.
The other fronts complete the picture. In the West Bank the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, pushed through the E1 settlement, some 3,401 homes on the corridor that severs the territory, and said its approval buries any Palestinian state. His cabinet colleagues inaugurated two new settlements last week, and Smotrich has demanded the army wage in the West Bank what it waged in Gaza. In Lebanon the military sits on some 234 square miles of the south. In Syria, after the fall of Assad, it crossed the old disengagement line into the UN buffer zone and dug into nine positions, including the peak of Mount Hermon. The war opened on Iran this year runs on the same logic. The Atlantic Council, no enemy of Israel, describes an emergency response to October that has hardened into a permanent doctrine of forward defense. None of this was concealed as intent. Handed a map of the promised land on live television last August, Netanyahu said he felt very attached to the idea of a Greater Israel reaching into Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.
A war that produces this much cannot be allowed to end, and it has not been. When the fighting began, the expectation across Israel was that it would close within months, the coalition would fracture, and Netanyahu would answer for the worst security failure in the country’s history. A New York Times investigation later set out how the opposite came to pass. He stretched the fighting past the point his own commanders judged necessary and added war aims as ceasefire talks matured. In April 2024 a six-week truce that would have freed more than thirty hostages reached the edge of a cabinet vote, and Smotrich ended it with a line, warning Netanyahu that if the deal passed, you no longer have a government. In March 2025 Israel broke a standing ceasefire, which brought the departed Itamar Ben-Gvir back into the coalition. The hostages were the cost, paid in installments.
The trial runs beneath the war. Netanyahu is the first sitting Israeli prime minister to stand as a criminal defendant, and for two years his testimony has slipped off the calendar, deferred for security and political reasons attached to one campaign after another. His government moved to remove the attorney general and the head of the Shin Bet, both connected to matters touching him. He has refused to permit a state commission of inquiry into October 7, the one body empowered to compel his aides to testify under oath, offering instead a panel picked by politicians. A war without an end keeps the trial from arriving and the inquiry from convening.
The making of the catastrophe is of a piece with its uses. The same New York Times investigation traced the opening to Netanyahu’s own record. For years his governments propped up Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, and in the months before the attack his campaign to break the power of Israel’s courts split the public and drained the army. The Hamas policy he stated himself. In 2015 he told the Knesset that Hamas was an asset and Mahmoud Abbas a burden. In 2019 he told Likud lawmakers that whoever wished to prevent a Palestinian state should support strengthening Hamas, and for years his cabinets let the Qatari cash flow that kept the group solvent. He now denies that any of it was meant to build Hamas up.
That doctrine is also why the warnings changed nothing. When bin Zayed telephoned, and when Egypt’s intelligence chief flew in for 67 minutes eleven days before the attack to say Gaza was about to erupt, they reached a prime minister whose whole strategy rested on a contained and useful Hamas. At a security meeting on 1 October, six days out, Netanyahu pushed back on officials who wanted to strike Hamas commanders, reportedly to protect the Saudi normalization deal he believed was near. The Abu Dhabi warning never reached the heads of Israel’s intelligence services, according to five former officials who spoke to the Times.
This returns the story to the plane. Netanyahu has called the warnings a fabrication and is suing the paper that first reported them. He has fought the inquiry that could test his account under oath. When the reporting reached a leader he could not sue, he went to him in person. The objection that the warnings carried no date is true and does not save him: a former Israeli official’s verdict on the Egyptian visit was that the messenger was the message. A denial flown to another country’s capital by night is its own kind of admission.
The neighbors have dropped the diplomatic cover. At the General Assembly on 22 September, King Abdullah of Jordan, whose kingdom has held a peace treaty with Israel since 1994, told the hall that Israel now acts with terrifying impunity. He accused the government of trying to erase Palestinian life and to impose a new territorial reality, naming Gaza, the West Bank and Syria as one enterprise testing how far it can go. Any move against Jordan’s water or its northern border, he said, would be read as a threat to the kingdom itself. He is the neighbor whose border the map reaches next.
Israelis vote on 27 October. The campaign turns on the first chapter, the warnings and the failure, because that is the part of the record a ballot can still punish. The chapters that followed have already been written into the map and into the machinery that keeps the war going and its author in office. That is why the flight to Abu Dhabi carries past its own strangeness. A man sure of his record does not cross the Gulf in the dark to ask another to unsay it.
