UAE billionaire questions normalisation with Israel after Ben Gvir calls for nightly killings of Palestinians
A prominent Emirati businessman who championed normalisation with Israel has questioned whether regional peace can be achieved while Israeli ministers openly demand the mass killing of Palestinians.
Khalaf Ahmad al-Habtoor, one of the UAE’s most prominent billionaires and a former member of the Federal National Council, accused Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir of a “dangerous moral decline”.
Ben Gvir called on Sunday for Israeli forces to kill “30 or 40” men, women or children in Gaza every night. He said Palestinians were “not worthy of life” and “not even people”.
In a post on X on Monday, Al Habtoor said “an Israeli government minister steps out before the world, openly and without shame, calling for the killing of 30 or 40 people in Gaza every night, and speaking of people as if they are ‘not deserving of life’!”
“What mind can accept this rhetoric?” he asked.
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Habtoor is not a government official, but the Dubai-based billionaire is close to the UAE’s ruling circles. The government tightly controls public expression, particularly among prominent Emiratis, making his intervention notable.
“If an official in the Israeli government can speak this way openly, without shame or fear of accountability, how can we, at the same time, be asked to speak of peace, negotiations, and coexistence?” Al Habtoor wrote.
Habtoor did not call on the UAE to suspend relations, impose sanctions or use its considerable economic leverage against Israel. Nor did he say how Arab and Muslim countries should respond to Ben Gvir’s call for nightly killings of Palestinians.
Trading partner
Nearly three years of genocide in Gaza have not stopped the UAE from maintaining full diplomatic, commercial and security ties with Israel.
The UAE remains Israel’s largest Arab trading partner. Bilateral trade reached $3.2bn in 2025, even as Israel continued killing Palestinians in Gaza after signing a ceasefire with Hamas last October.
Habtoor’s intervention carries particular weight because he strongly defended the Abraham Accords in 2020. He argued that Arab recognition would moderate Israel and encourage concessions to the Palestinians.
“The more Israel is connected with its Arab neighbors on multiple levels, the more it will be open to making compromises,” he wrote at the time.
Since then Israel committed genocide in Gaza, deepened its apartheid system in the occupied West Bank and expanded illegal settlements at record speed.
It attacked and occupied parts of Lebanon and Syria, bombed Qatar, Yemen and Iraq, and pushed the US into a war with Iran that plunged the region into chaos and inflicted global economic damage.
“The people of Gaza are human beings. Their children are human beings. Their women and men are human beings. And they have the same right to life and dignity as we all do,” he added in his post.
This is not Habtoor’s first public intervention. In March, shortly after the Israeli-US war on Iran began, he accused President Donald Trump of dragging Washington’s Gulf partners into “danger” and betraying Americans by putting war at the “top of your priorities”.
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