Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday he will sue Haaretz for libel after the newspaper published an investigation, calling it 'lies' and denying he spoke with the UAE president, The Zioneer reports.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escalated his response to a Haaretz investigation on Wednesday morning, announcing he will file a libel lawsuit against the newspaper over its report alleging a phone call between him and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed shortly before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Netanyahu called the report 'lies' and said he did not speak with bin Zayed during the period in question. The lawsuit marks the prime minister's most aggressive step yet in a story that has generated multiple denials from his office.
The thread of denials began on Tuesday morning, Sep 8, at 09:04 Jerusalem, when the Prime Minister's Office first dismissed the Haaretz report as an 'absolute lie' and denied any call in the relevant period. Within hours, a senior source in Netanyahu's circle, who reviewed call transcripts, confirmed that the last conversation between the two leaders before Oct. 7 took place in early 2023, with a subsequent call a week after the attack. The PMO then issued a more detailed denial, stating that a review of call logs and entry records found no record of a UAE representative visit during the period from September to Oct. 7. Later that same morning, Netanyahu himself reiterated the denial via The Zioneer, stating he did not speak with bin Zayed between the start of September 2023 and the Oct. 7 attack.
The source quality evolved from an anonymous PMO dismissal to a named source with call transcripts, then to an official PMO statement, and finally to a personal denial from the prime minister. Wednesday's libel threat represents a further escalation, shifting the dispute from a political denial to a legal one. As The Zioneer reported on Sep 8, the PMO has consistently maintained that no communication occurred in the pre-Oct. 7 window.
The Haaretz investigation itself has not been retracted, and the prime minister's libel claim has not yet been filed in court. The precise call log evidence that Haaretz relies on remains a matter of competing claims between the newspaper and the PMO.
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Source and signal
- Open-source intake