Israel just shared secret Iran intelligence with the UAE and Saudi Arabia denies being there
1 hour ago · 3 October 2026Share
Official portrait of Israel's 9th Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Avi Ohayon · CC BY-SA 3.0
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, flew to the United Arab Emirates six days ago.
He met Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's leader, in Abu Dhabi.
And he brought intelligence with him.
A person familiar with the meeting told CNN that Netanyahu showed Sheikh Mohammed new evidence of construction at a site Israel calls Pickaxe Mountain. It sits about 140 miles south of Tehran, right next to Iran's Natanz enrichment facility.
And Natanz matters. America bombed it during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in 2025.
So what is Israel saying this new construction means? That Iran is trying to rebuild what those strikes destroyed.
Netanyahu also told the meeting that Israel believes Iran could launch an attack somewhere in the region within weeks.
Both governments confirmed the meeting happened, one day after it took place. That's new. Netanyahu has never had a publicly confirmed visit to the UAE before.
WAM, the UAE's state news agency, said the two leaders discussed bilateral relations and ways to strengthen them. Netanyahu's office said the talks covered regional challenges. One person familiar with the meeting says the conversation also covered the Houthis in Yemen, the Bab al-Mandeb waterway and the Strait of Hormuz.
Netanyahu didn't go alone. His wife went. So did the head of Israel's National Security Council, the head of Mossad, a military secretary and a political adviser.
Now here's where it gets messy.
Two people familiar with the visit told CNN that a senior Saudi security official was in the room too. Saudi officials say nobody from Saudi Arabia was there at all. Nobody has settled that disagreement.
And this visit isn't happening in a vacuum. It lands right in the middle of the most damaging story of Netanyahu's political life.
Haaretz reported last month that Sheikh Mohammed phoned Netanyahu about ten days before the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. The report is that he warned Netanyahu about a coming attack from Yahya Sinwar, Hamas's leader at the time, calling it a "huge surprise." The Wall Street Journal has separately reported at least three Egyptian warnings reached Israel before the attack, the last one in a call to Netanyahu himself days before it happened.
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Aerial view of Tehran. File photo. Hansueli Krapf · CC BY-SA 3.0
Netanyahu denies all of it. He posted online that he never met or spoke with the Egyptian intelligence chief before 7 October, and said hostile states were behind the allegations.
Gadi Eizenkot is currently polling as Netanyahu's strongest challenger in Israel's election on 27 October. He said the allegations leave no room for doubt about how Netanyahu handled the run-up to the attack.
Netanyahu's Likud party has accused Mohammed Dahlan, a UAE-based Palestinian politician, of foreign interference in the election. It has not given any evidence for that.
And here's the thing. Neither government mentioned the October 7 warning dispute in its statement confirming this trip.
The Associated Press has reported, citing a person with direct knowledge, that Netanyahu asked Sheikh Mohammed to deny ever warning him before the attack. No such denial showed up in the UAE's official statement. Israel's Prime Minister's Office calls that report fake news, and says the visit was only about strengthening relations and regional challenges.
Israel's Shin Bet filed a complaint with the military censor after Channel 12 first broke news of the trip. It said the report put the prime minister at risk and exposed how the agency works.
The UAE Foreign Ministry addressed the wider question of intelligence sharing earlier this month. It said that relevant intelligence is shared between the two countries whenever it is needed. It did not directly deny the reported phone call before October 7.
This isn't even the first disputed UAE meeting. In May, Netanyahu's office said he had secretly visited the UAE in March, calling it a historic breakthrough. The UAE Foreign Ministry called that completely unfounded.
The two countries have been getting closer since the Iran war started. Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, said in May that Israel had sent Iron Dome air defence batteries and troops to the UAE to help defend it from Iran. Israeli officials say security cooperation between the two countries reached unprecedented levels during that war.
Iran's Foreign Ministry has only put out a general statement condemning Israel's presence in the region. It hasn't addressed the intelligence claim or the visit directly.
So what don't we know? How Israel got the Pickaxe Mountain intelligence. What classification it carried. Whether the warning about an Iranian attack within weeks was also shared with Washington. And whether Saudi Arabia's denial means it genuinely wasn't there, or is covering for the fact that it was.
The visit came exactly one month before Netanyahu faces voters.
Whatever else it did, it put him back in a room with the one Gulf leader at the centre of the worst scandal of his career.
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