Topaz Luk
Role at the time: Senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking on Kan Reshet Bet
Response to this claim
No call between Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Zayed occurred during the relevant period, and Netanyahu received no UAE warning before October 7.
“There was no call of this kind, no warning of this kind was received ... From a check I made, there was no such call at all in that period ... In practice, there is no such thing as a call taking place in a vacuum. There is always someone else on the line: the head of the National Security Council, the military secretary or a diplomatic adviser, and the summary of the call is automatically passed on to the army and the security agencies to act on. Netanyahu would not have kept such a thing to himself; he would have woken everyone up and alerted them (Translated from Hebrew. Original: לא הייתה שיחה מהסוג הזה, לא התקבלה אזהרה מהסוג הזה ... מבדיקה שערכתי, לא הייתה שיחה כזאת בכלל באותה תקופה ... בפרקטיקה אין דבר כזה ששיחה מתקיימת בוואקום. תמיד יש נציג על הקו. ראש המל"ל, המזכיר הצבאי או יועץ מדיני, וסיכום השיחה מועבר אוטומטית לטיפול הצבא וגופי הביטחון. נתניהו לא היה מסתיר דבר כזה בליבו, הוא היה מעיר ומתריע את כולם)”
Kan News article on an on-air interview with Topaz Luk, a senior adviser to Netanyahu, on the Kan Reshet Bet program Kobenovic on the morning the Haaretz report appeared. We could not obtain a recording of the interview, so the quotations come from Kan's text.
Archived copy (opens in a new tab)Why we used this label
The reference point is whether Netanyahu received the reported warning from the UAE president and failed to relay or act on it. Luk says the call did not take place and no warning was received, and offers a procedural reason why Netanyahu would have passed such a warning on. That is a denial that the alleged events occurred, not a defense of conduct, so we used denies rather than challenges the characterization.