Ex-PA minister details his pre-Oct. 7 warning about Sinwar’s ‘earthquake’ threat

Former PA minister Sufian Abu Zaida details the warning he conveyed in September 2023 about an “earthquake” being planned by then-Hamas military chief Yahya Sinwar, in an interview with the Pan-Arab news channel Al-Rad.

The remarks confirm what Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar revealed last week, after Abu Zaida came forward as the Palestinian source referred to in a bombshell report about the warning.

The Fatah member says he mediated efforts to reach a hostage-prisoner exchange deal with Hamas, which was then the Gaza Strip’s de facto government, for about a year and a half before October 2023.

The timeline would place the start of talks during the previous Bennett-Lapid government, whereas Eldar’s report indicated they started when the current, Netanyahu-led government took office. The discrepancy is not immediately explained.

The deal was supposed to include the four living and deceased hostages being held in Gaza at the time in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, Abu Zaida says.

According to the Palestinian official, in late September, Sinwar asked him to convey a message to Israel saying: “By the end of September, we will put the cards on the table, and it will cause an earthquake in the negotiations. They should prepare themselves for the prisons [in Israel] to be emptied.”

The Al-Rad report says that Abu Zaida, who is close to former senior Palestinian official Mohammed Dahlan, informed Dahlan and his close associate Samir Mashharawi about the message while also conveying it to Shin Bet officials.

According to an investigation by Eldar and Ruti Yuval published in Haaretz, a similar message about an “earthquake” that Sinwar would carry out was subsequently conveyed through Dahlan’s associates to Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, who called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and passed the message on to him as well.

Abu Zaida does not address that element of the report.