Netanyahu Made Secret One-Day Trip to Abu Dhabi, Met UAE's Bin Zayed, Israeli Official Confirms

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew privately to Abu Dhabi on Sunday, September 27, and met UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a senior Israeli official confirmed to Reuters. Neither Netanyahu's office nor the UAE foreign ministry has issued a public statement on the meeting.

Israel's Channel 12 and public broadcaster KAN reported additional detail on the logistics. According to KAN, Netanyahu departed Ben Gurion Airport on a private plane in the afternoon, landed in Abu Dhabi at 3:10 p.m. local time, and flew back roughly four hours later, landing in Israel around 10 p.m. KAN said the aircraft is owned by an unnamed Israeli businessman and has previously been used by senior Israeli officials for international travel, including a prior Netanyahu trip to the UAE during the war with Iran.

The Oct. 7 Warning Dispute

The visit lands in the middle of an escalating political fight in Israel. Haaretz reported earlier this month that bin Zayed warned Netanyahu roughly ten days before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that the group was preparing a major operation, and that the warning was never passed on to Israel's intelligence agencies or military. Anadolu Agency reported that the New York Times carried a similar account on Friday, September 25, describing a confidential UAE warning that Netanyahu allegedly did not relay to his security chiefs.

Netanyahu has flatly denied receiving any such warning and has threatened legal action against Haaretz. The UAE has not directly confirmed or denied the specific Haaretz account. It has said only that Israel and the UAE have maintained "open and direct lines of communication" since the two countries normalized relations under the 2020 Abraham Accords. A UAE source told Reuters that security matters are handled through "relevant entities," not "at the level of national leaders," which stops short of confirming or denying any leader-to-leader warning took place.

If a foreign head of state really did pass along a specific warning about an imminent Hamas attack and it never reached Israel's military or intelligence services, that would be a legitimate line of inquiry into command failures before the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history. Netanyahu's denial and his threat to sue Haaretz are also on the record and deserve equal weight. No Israeli or Emirati investigation into the claim has been announced in these reports.

A Pattern of Undisclosed Meetings

Sunday's trip was not an isolated event. The Times of India and Reuters (via U.S. News & World Report) both noted that Netanyahu's office said in May that he had "secretly visited" the UAE, only for the UAE to deny that any meeting with bin Zayed took place. A person familiar with that meeting later said the two men actually met in Al-Ain, an oasis city near the Omani border, on March 26. Ynet News reported that Netanyahu also made an undisclosed trip to Abu Dhabi during Operation Roaring Lion, Israel's military campaign against Iran earlier this year, meaning Sunday marks at least the third known secret visit in roughly six months.

Warming Ties After the Iran War

Several outlets tied the visit to a broader shift in the Israel-UAE relationship following the Israel-Iran conflict. Ynet News and Iran International both reported that Israel temporarily supplied the UAE with an Iron Dome missile defense system, staffed by Israeli operators, during the fighting. Ynet quoted unnamed Emirati diplomats saying the gesture "will never be forgotten" and that "it is good to know who your friends are in times of trouble." Ynet also noted that the UAE, along with Bahrain, was one of only two Arab countries whose UN delegates stayed in the General Assembly hall for Netanyahu's recent speech, while other delegations walked out.

Anadolu Agency's coverage diverged from the other sources by including additional context largely absent elsewhere: it noted the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in 2024 over alleged war crimes in Gaza, and cited a Gaza Health Ministry-sourced casualty figure of more than 74,000 Palestinians killed since October 8, 2023.

No government has confirmed what Netanyahu and bin Zayed actually discussed on Sunday. The UAE foreign ministry has still not addressed the Haaretz warning report directly, more than a week after it was published. Netanyahu's threatened lawsuit against Haaretz has not yet been filed, according to the reporting reviewed. Whether that suit materializes, and whether Israeli investigators or the Knesset open any formal inquiry into how a foreign warning, if one existed, failed to reach the IDF before October 7, remains an open question heading into Netanyahu's reelection fight.