Following the 2014 war in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a Saudi offer to rebuild the Strip, oust Hamas and replace it with the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, according to a Friday report.

Yedioth Ahronoth alleged the decision, which thwarted normalization with Riyadh that year, led the premier to solicit Qatar’s monthly cash transfers to Gaza, despite repeated warnings from the Mossad.

A former Mossad official cited by the newspaper said that Netanyahu’s choice was part of the premier’s “divide and conquer” strategy to thwart Palestinian statehood by driving a wedge between Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank.

Qatar continued to send Hamas millions of dollars monthly with Israel’s blessing until October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.

The Yedioth Ahronoth report, which cited several current and former Israeli officials, came a day after Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara launched a probe into some members of Netanyahu’s staff for alleged undeclared ties to Qatar, which Israel has long accused of funding terrorism. Despite tenuous relations, the Gulf state helped mediate Israel’s current ceasefire and hostage deal with Hamas.

In the years prior to the latest war, Netanyahu repeatedly rebuffed calls by security chiefs to assassinate the attack’s masterminds, Hamas chiefs Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Deif, and played down the risk to Israel from Gaza — including in consultations just six days before Oct. 7 — Yedioth Ahronoth reported, citing “one of the heads of the security establishment.”

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett planned to cut off the Qatari cash flow and ordered Israel’s security forces to prepare to kill Sinwar and Deif, but the plans were mothballed when Netanyahu returned to office in late 2022, according to the newspaper. Israel ultimately killed Deif in July 2024 and Sinwar in October amid the war in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s spokesman Omer Dostri rejected the report, saying it “recycles baseless, previously refuted lies that are meant to vilify Prime Minister Netanyahu.” He said the premier had for years advocated assassinating Hamas’s leadership, including at the meeting held on October 1, 2023.

Dostri also accused Israel’s intelligence community of failing to brief Netanyahu on Hamas’s plans for a large-scale invasion and said it was Israel’s security chiefs who had promoted the Qatari funds scheme while assuring the premier that the money was not going toward terrorism.

Yedioth Ahronoth pointed out that former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen had publicly warned against the money transfers in his 2021 retirement speech. The newspaper also said current Mossad chief David Barnea repeatedly spoke out against the transfers in meetings with both Bennett and Netanyahu.

The premier previously tweeted that “there was never any information [indicating] that this funding was going to terrorism.”

A former Shin Bet official cited by Yedioth cast doubt on that assertion but argued the point was moot: “If Hamas doesn’t need to pay a schoolteacher’s hundred-dollar salary, and Qatar does it instead at Israel’s request, then [Hamas] can divert the hundred dollars they saved to arms procurement,” he noted.

According to a former Mossad official cited by Yedioth, the Qatari funds scheme was born after the collapse of Saudi Arabia’s offer to help reconstruct Gaza.

Saudi Arabia’s offer came in a meeting between Netanyahu and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan in late August 2014, days after that year’s war in Gaza ended, the newspaper reported. The meeting, attended by top Mossad officials, was said to have taken place abroad, but it was unclear where.

At the meeting, the Saudi prince reportedly offered on behalf of then-Saudi King Abdullah to fund Gaza’s reconstruction, under the aegis of a reformed Palestinian Authority, as a precursor to Israeli-Saudi normalization to be announced as soon as the United Nations General Assembly meeting the following month.

In the long run, Saudi sponsorship of Gaza’s reconstruction was to be a prelude to the sides advancing the kingdom’s 2002 Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, based on a two-state solution that would see the entire Arab world normalize relations with Israel. However, Bandar reportedly stressed, Israel would not be required to commit to Palestinian statehood just yet.

Yedioth quoted a former intelligence figure as saying the meeting left Netanyahu and other officials with “an amazing feeling that a window of opportunity had opened.”

Talks with Saudi Arabia were overseen by the Mossad, which typically handles relations with countries with which Israel has no formal ties.

However, according to Yedioth, upon his return to Israel, Netanyahu informed the agency that he would take over the talks — explaining they were diplomatic, rather than security-related —  and delegated his confidant and personal attorney Yitzhak Molcho to manage the process.

Though the premier insisted he was committed to Prince Bandar’s proposal, Mossad officials suspected Molcho’s installment was a bid to thwart the talks, according to Yedioth. The Saudi prince was reportedly incensed at Netanyahu’s move, and the talks soon collapsed.

As a result, the PA — suspecting Netanyahu sought to diminish it and bolster Hamas — decided to stop funding projects in Gaza, leading the premier to solicit the money from Qatar.

The PA, which is dominated by the secularist Fatah movement, was violently ousted by the Islamist Hamas from Gaza in 2007. Israel’s right wing has long cast the PA as essentially indistinguishable from Hamas, pointing to the Ramallah-based body’s anti-Israel school curriculum and payment of stipends to Palestinian security prisoners and their families (the PA recently committed to ending the latter practice).

Netanyahu has rejected calls by Western allies and Arab states to let the PA take over Gaza after the war.

The premier has thus far blocked the formation of a state commission of inquiry into the failures of Israel’s political echelon leading up to October 7, 2023, when Hamas started the war.

Netanyahu’s supporters, who have clashed with the judiciary, reject such a commission since it would be headed by a former Supreme Court justice, alleging it would be necessarily biased against the premier and his government.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s critics, including the authors of the Friday Yedioth report, accuse the long-serving leader of trying to evade responsibility by laying the blame for the assault on Israel’s security forces, despite dictating Israel’s policy vis-a-vis Gaza for the better part of the past 16 years.

The IDF’s internal probes of Oct. 7, published on Thursday, found the military had for decades misconceived the danger from Gaza, making southern Israel vulnerable to attack and leading to systemic failure when the attack was carried out.

No probe of the government’s failings has been carried out as of yet.