Israel’s Likud party stepped up its attack on a Haaretz report on Wednesday evening over an alleged warning that UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the 7th October 2023 attack, moving from denying the report’s contents to accusing Palestinian and Israeli figures of trying to interfere in the election in cooperation with foreign parties, and calling for a criminal investigation.
In a strongly worded statement, Likud claimed that “the real issue that has emerged over the past two days is blatant foreign interference in the Israeli election”. It alleged that ousted Palestinian Fatah movement’s leader Mohammed Dahlan, who lives in the UAE, was behind information published by Haaretz journalists Shlomi Eldar and Roth Yuval.
The party claimed that “it has become clear that the Palestinian official Mohammed Dahlan, who is in the UAE, is behind the false report in Haaretz“. It added that Dahlan “wants to bring down the right-wing government led by Netanyahu because he dreams of taking control of the Gaza Strip”.
Likud directly linked these allegations to the Israeli election, claiming that Dahlan needs “a weak left-wing government made up of (former Israeli army chief) Gadi Eisenkot, (former deputy army chief) Yair Golan, (former Defense Minister) Avigdor Lieberman and the Arab parties” to achieve this. Such a government, the statement said, “would withdraw from Gaza and hand it over to his control”.
