This same revelation triggered a minor crisis at the time within the Israeli government itself, forced to explain why so precise a plan had remained in an administrative drawer for more than a year. The official explanation, summarised by several unnamed officials, was that no analyst wanted to take responsibility for declaring credible a scenario involving a two-front war, precisely when the country's strategic attention was focused on Hezbollah and on Iran. That hierarchy of threats, decided at the top, left Gaza in permanent second place, not out of ignorance but as a budgetary and doctrinal choice.
The document known as the Jericho Wall circulated for more than a year among Israeli military and intelligence commands before 7 October 2023 without reaching the higher political levels, according to the revelation published by The New York Times in December of that same year.
The Doctrine of Mowing the Lawn
None of these episodes is well explained as mere negligence when viewed in light of a doctrine that Israel formulated, published and openly defended for more than a decade. In 2014, researchers Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, described in the Journal of Strategic Studies a strategy baptised mowing the lawn, brief and forceful military operations designed to punish Hamas and degrade its military capacity without seeking its elimination, with the sole purpose of buying a period of calm. The metaphor is explicit, Palestinian fighters and their improvised arsenal are grass that grows back and needs mowing, not a cancer to be extirpated once and for all.
The phrase that has since circulated as an axiom in Israeli strategic debate, whoever does not mow the lawn ends up mowed by it, is widely attributed to Naftali Bennett, though without a precisely dated primary source. Whether or not the quotation belongs to him exactly, the phrase invents nothing, it simply says aloud what had already been practised in private for years.
Read today, that phrase describes with precision the government's stance toward the warnings received before October 2023. A contained Hamas is not, in this logic, a threat demanding absolute prevention. It is an adversary that fulfils a function, struck from time to time, financed under certain conditions, but never quite eliminated.
The doctrine's practical application has dates and proper names. Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Guardian of the Walls in 2021, Dawn in 2022, Shield and Arrow in 2023, four brief campaigns, all presented as one-off responses to a specific escalation, none of them conceived or executed to dismantle Hamas's administration of Gaza. Between one and the next, Israeli political life followed its normal course, governments fell and formed, trials, elections, without the underlying relationship with Hamas changing in nature. The lawn was mowed, it was left to grow back, it was mowed again. 7 October did not break that logic from the outside, it overflowed it from within.
Qatari Money as Instrument, Not as Error
Qatari financing of Gaza was not a negligence tolerated reluctantly. It was a policy sustained with Israel's explicit knowledge for years, delivered in suitcases of cash that crossed the border under the surveillance of the Israeli army itself. In November 2018, three suitcases containing fifteen million dollars in cash passed through the Erez crossing toward Gaza, according to reporting at the time by CNN, the Jewish agency JTA and the Jerusalem Post, with Israel's explicit approval as a condition for the money's entry. The operation was repeated month after month for years, always under the same procedure, always with the same authorisation.
According to the revelation published by Haaretz in February 2019, later confirmed by the Times of Israel and by CNN, Qatar transferred to Gaza more than 1.1 billion dollars between 2012 and 2018, with the explicit authorisation of the Israeli government.
Netanyahu came to justify this money in terms that his advisers were never able to fully neutralise.
Several Israeli outlets independently reported, based on a March 2019 Likud parliamentary group meeting, among them the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post and, later, The Guardian, that Netanyahu had told his lawmakers that anyone who wanted to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needed to support strengthening Hamas and transferring money to that group, as part of a strategy to keep the Palestinians of Gaza separated from those of the West Bank. Netanyahu denied saying this in an interview granted to Time magazine in 2024. That money was not financing peace. It was financing fragmentation.
A subsequent report by Yedioth Ahronoth, published in February 2025 and not independently confirmed to date by another outlet, traced the origin of this financial corridor to Netanyahu's rejection of a Saudi peace offer from August 2014, which would have allowed Gaza to be rebuilt under Palestinian Authority administration in exchange for normalisation with Riyadh. Netanyahu's office described that report as recycled lies.
Still according to that same report, not independently confirmed to date, the 2014 Saudi offer arrived through the then Prince Bandar bin Sultan, days after the end of a war in Gaza, and envisaged financing from King Abdullah for reconstruction, to be announced before the United Nations General Assembly, without requiring any prior Israeli commitment on a Palestinian state. Netanyahu removed the negotiations from Mossad's hands and entrusted them to his personal lawyer, Yitzhak Molcho, a decision that several intelligence officials interpreted at the time as a manoeuvre designed to sink them. Weeks later, again according to the same account, Netanyahu asked Qatar to maintain and expand its monthly transfers to Gaza, despite Mossad's own warnings about the ultimate destination of that money.
The Question the Scandal Does Not Ask
Placed alongside these antecedents, bin Zayed's call loses its status as an exception. It becomes one more piece in an already voluminous file. The debate dominating the Israeli press, did Netanyahu lie, should he resign, does the revelation harm his campaign, presupposes that the failure was isolated and personal, correctable through a change of government.
The facts gathered here suggest something else, an architecture of containment that has survived different prime ministers, different coalitions and different electoral cycles, because it would have served, judging by these facts, an objective shared by a good part of the Israeli political establishment, preventing the emergence of a unified Palestinian authority capable of negotiating a state. None of this exonerates Netanyahu from the specific decision not to share an explicit warning with his security chiefs, a fact that, if confirmed in the terms Haaretz describes, constitutes in itself a grave command failure. But reducing the episode to that individual fault is also a form of political protection, that of an entire system that prefers to debate one man's integrity rather than the usefulness that this man, and several of his predecessors, found in keeping alive the threat that ended up, on 7 October 2023, overwhelming them.
Netanyahu may lose the court of opinion now playing out in the Israeli press. He may even lose the October elections. Neither outcome obliges anyone in Jerusalem to explain why, for years, a weak but living Hamas was preferred to a strong and unified Palestinian Authority. That is the question that survives the scandal, and survives its protagonist as well. It will likewise survive Eldar and Yuval's book, the announced lawsuit against Haaretz, and the result of 27 October, because it depends on no proper name, it depends on a calculation that several Israeli governments, of different stripes, have found profitable for nearly two decades…
G.S.
Sources
- Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Before Oct. 7. He Didn't Brief Israel's Security Chiefs
- Netanyahu says he'll sue Haaretz over report UAE leader warned him days before Oct. 7
- UAE warned Netanyahu of 7 October attack, Israeli newspaper reports
- Israeli military analysts flagged Hamas plans to 'start a war' before terror attack
- The October 7 Attack: An Assessment of the Intelligence Failings
- Mow the Lawn: Israel's Strategy For Perpetual War With the Palestinians
- Benjamin Netanyahu: Money to Hamas part of strategy to keep Palestinians divided
- With Israel's Consent, Qatar Gave Gaza $1 Billion Since 2012
- Qatar gave over $1.1 billion to Gaza Strip from 2012-18, ministers told
- Qatar sent millions to Gaza for years, with Israel's backing
- Report: Netanyahu's rejection of Saudi peace offer led to Qatari cash corridor to Hamas
- Fact-Checking Netanyahu's 2024 TIME Interview
- Israel OKs Qatari $15 million cash transfer by suitcases into Gaza amid terrorist escalation
- Suitcases of $15M in cash from Qatar bring relief for Gaza
- Three suitcases stuffed with $15m passed to Hamas in Gaza
In late September 2023, the president of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed, telephoned Benjamin Netanyahu for forty-five minutes to warn him that Yahya Sinwar was preparing an operation capable of producing a bloodbath. Netanyahu, according to the revelation published by Haaretz on 8 September 2026 and drawn from the book Kidnapped, 843 Days of Abandonment, by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, replied calmly, insisted that Israel was prepared, and suggested that any attack would more likely originate from the West Bank. Eldar, a veteran correspondent specialising in Palestinian and Arab affairs, is not a marginal figure in Israeli journalism, and that record weighs on how the book has been received inside the country, independently of the official response. Netanyahu did not inform his own security chiefs of the content of the call. His office described the account as an absolute lie and announced a lawsuit against the newspaper and against Eldar. The former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot responded that Netanyahu had received dozens of warnings before 7 October and ignored all of them, and his rival Naftali Bennett went further, stating publicly that the Haaretz account is true. The episode has broken in the middle of the campaign toward the 27 October elections, and the press has treated it, with little variation, as a moral trial over one man's honesty. That reading, without being false, leaves untouched a more disturbing question, why a warning of this calibre remained, in practice, without consequence for a state apparatus that had spent years building its relationship with Hamas on premises entirely different from that of preventing an attack of this nature.
Bin Zayed was not calling out of altruism. The Emirates had normalised relations with Israel in 2020 through the Abraham Accords, and a major destabilisation in Gaza directly threatened that diplomatic architecture, not to mention a parallel track of Saudi normalisation under discussion in those very weeks. The warning protected a concrete geopolitical edifice, not Israeli lives in the abstract, and that distinction matters for understanding why Netanyahu could listen to it with the calm that Haaretz describes without sensing that an urgent stake was at play for his own political calculation.
A Warning Among Many Others
Bin Zayed's call was neither the first ignored warning nor the most detailed one. More than a year before 7 October, Israeli military intelligence already possessed a document known informally as the Jericho Wall, which described point by point the type of invasion that Hamas would eventually carry out, an initial rocket barrage, the neutralisation of electronic surveillance, waves of fighters crossing the border by land and by air. According to the revelation published by The New York Times in December 2023, an analyst who had detected a training exercise matching this plan was removed from the file, and a colonel suggested she wait patiently.
The pattern repeats itself. The names change, not the outcome.
For months, female soldiers assigned to border surveillance flagged suspicious movements without their reports producing any proportionate response. An officer who warned that Hamas was building a major invasion capability was dismissed by his superiors, who described his analysis as aspirational and entirely imaginary, according to an assessment documented by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
The document circulated widely among military and intelligence commands, but it was never established that it reached the higher political levels.
This same revelation triggered a minor crisis at the time within the Israeli government itself, forced to explain why so precise a plan had remained in an administrative drawer for more than a year. The official explanation, summarised by several unnamed officials, was that no analyst wanted to take responsibility for declaring credible a scenario involving a two-front war, precisely when the country's strategic attention was focused on Hezbollah and on Iran. That hierarchy of threats, decided at the top, left Gaza in permanent second place, not out of ignorance but as a budgetary and doctrinal choice.
The document known as the Jericho Wall circulated for more than a year among Israeli military and intelligence commands before 7 October 2023 without reaching the higher political levels, according to the revelation published by The New York Times in December of that same year.
The Doctrine of Mowing the Lawn
None of these episodes is well explained as mere negligence when viewed in light of a doctrine that Israel formulated, published and openly defended for more than a decade. In 2014, researchers Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, described in the Journal of Strategic Studies a strategy baptised mowing the lawn, brief and forceful military operations designed to punish Hamas and degrade its military capacity without seeking its elimination, with the sole purpose of buying a period of calm. The metaphor is explicit, Palestinian fighters and their improvised arsenal are grass that grows back and needs mowing, not a cancer to be extirpated once and for all.
The phrase that has since circulated as an axiom in Israeli strategic debate, whoever does not mow the lawn ends up mowed by it, is widely attributed to Naftali Bennett, though without a precisely dated primary source. Whether or not the quotation belongs to him exactly, the phrase invents nothing, it simply says aloud what had already been practised in private for years.
Read today, that phrase describes with precision the government's stance toward the warnings received before October 2023. A contained Hamas is not, in this logic, a threat demanding absolute prevention. It is an adversary that fulfils a function, struck from time to time, financed under certain conditions, but never quite eliminated.
The doctrine's practical application has dates and proper names. Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Guardian of the Walls in 2021, Dawn in 2022, Shield and Arrow in 2023, four brief campaigns, all presented as one-off responses to a specific escalation, none of them conceived or executed to dismantle Hamas's administration of Gaza. Between one and the next, Israeli political life followed its normal course, governments fell and formed, trials, elections, without the underlying relationship with Hamas changing in nature. The lawn was mowed, it was left to grow back, it was mowed again. 7 October did not break that logic from the outside, it overflowed it from within.
Qatari Money as Instrument, Not as Error
Qatari financing of Gaza was not a negligence tolerated reluctantly. It was a policy sustained with Israel's explicit knowledge for years, delivered in suitcases of cash that crossed the border under the surveillance of the Israeli army itself. In November 2018, three suitcases containing fifteen million dollars in cash passed through the Erez crossing toward Gaza, according to reporting at the time by CNN, the Jewish agency JTA and the Jerusalem Post, with Israel's explicit approval as a condition for the money's entry. The operation was repeated month after month for years, always under the same procedure, always with the same authorisation.
According to the revelation published by Haaretz in February 2019, later confirmed by the Times of Israel and by CNN, Qatar transferred to Gaza more than 1.1 billion dollars between 2012 and 2018, with the explicit authorisation of the Israeli government.
Netanyahu came to justify this money in terms that his advisers were never able to fully neutralise.
Several Israeli outlets independently reported, based on a March 2019 Likud parliamentary group meeting, among them the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post and, later, The Guardian, that Netanyahu had told his lawmakers that anyone who wanted to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needed to support strengthening Hamas and transferring money to that group, as part of a strategy to keep the Palestinians of Gaza separated from those of the West Bank. Netanyahu denied saying this in an interview granted to Time magazine in 2024. That money was not financing peace. It was financing fragmentation.
A subsequent report by Yedioth Ahronoth, published in February 2025 and not independently confirmed to date by another outlet, traced the origin of this financial corridor to Netanyahu's rejection of a Saudi peace offer from August 2014, which would have allowed Gaza to be rebuilt under Palestinian Authority administration in exchange for normalisation with Riyadh. Netanyahu's office described that report as recycled lies.
Still according to that same report, not independently confirmed to date, the 2014 Saudi offer arrived through the then Prince Bandar bin Sultan, days after the end of a war in Gaza, and envisaged financing from King Abdullah for reconstruction, to be announced before the United Nations General Assembly, without requiring any prior Israeli commitment on a Palestinian state. Netanyahu removed the negotiations from Mossad's hands and entrusted them to his personal lawyer, Yitzhak Molcho, a decision that several intelligence officials interpreted at the time as a manoeuvre designed to sink them. Weeks later, again according to the same account, Netanyahu asked Qatar to maintain and expand its monthly transfers to Gaza, despite Mossad's own warnings about the ultimate destination of that money.
The Question the Scandal Does Not Ask
Placed alongside these antecedents, bin Zayed's call loses its status as an exception. It becomes one more piece in an already voluminous file. The debate dominating the Israeli press, did Netanyahu lie, should he resign, does the revelation harm his campaign, presupposes that the failure was isolated and personal, correctable through a change of government.
The facts gathered here suggest something else, an architecture of containment that has survived different prime ministers, different coalitions and different electoral cycles, because it would have served, judging by these facts, an objective shared by a good part of the Israeli political establishment, preventing the emergence of a unified Palestinian authority capable of negotiating a state. None of this exonerates Netanyahu from the specific decision not to share an explicit warning with his security chiefs, a fact that, if confirmed in the terms Haaretz describes, constitutes in itself a grave command failure. But reducing the episode to that individual fault is also a form of political protection, that of an entire system that prefers to debate one man's integrity rather than the usefulness that this man, and several of his predecessors, found in keeping alive the threat that ended up, on 7 October 2023, overwhelming them.
Netanyahu may lose the court of opinion now playing out in the Israeli press. He may even lose the October elections. Neither outcome obliges anyone in Jerusalem to explain why, for years, a weak but living Hamas was preferred to a strong and unified Palestinian Authority. That is the question that survives the scandal, and survives its protagonist as well. It will likewise survive Eldar and Yuval's book, the announced lawsuit against Haaretz, and the result of 27 October, because it depends on no proper name, it depends on a calculation that several Israeli governments, of different stripes, have found profitable for nearly two decades…
G.S.
Sources
- Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Before Oct. 7. He Didn't Brief Israel's Security Chiefs
- Netanyahu says he'll sue Haaretz over report UAE leader warned him days before Oct. 7
- UAE warned Netanyahu of 7 October attack, Israeli newspaper reports
- Israeli military analysts flagged Hamas plans to 'start a war' before terror attack
- The October 7 Attack: An Assessment of the Intelligence Failings
- Mow the Lawn: Israel's Strategy For Perpetual War With the Palestinians
- Benjamin Netanyahu: Money to Hamas part of strategy to keep Palestinians divided
- With Israel's Consent, Qatar Gave Gaza $1 Billion Since 2012
- Qatar gave over $1.1 billion to Gaza Strip from 2012-18, ministers told
- Qatar sent millions to Gaza for years, with Israel's backing
- Report: Netanyahu's rejection of Saudi peace offer led to Qatari cash corridor to Hamas
- Fact-Checking Netanyahu's 2024 TIME Interview
- Israel OKs Qatari $15 million cash transfer by suitcases into Gaza amid terrorist escalation
- Suitcases of $15M in cash from Qatar bring relief for Gaza
- Three suitcases stuffed with $15m passed to Hamas in Gaza
