A video circulating online in October shows an attack on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv that left him severely injured.
In late October, a video spread on social media with claims it showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being attacked and seriously injured in Tel Aviv.
“Breaking 🚨 A very dangerous attack on Netanyahu in Tel Aviv it appears he has sustained severe injuries, and an aircraft is being dispatched to transport him to the United States. This is clearly evident from the footage,” one X post (archived) captioned the footage.
Other X users also shared the video. Snopes readers searched our website for information about the alleged attack.
The video is authentic, meaning not generated with artificial intelligence or digitally edited. However, it does not show Netanyahu. It shows an attempted attack on Bulgarian politician Ahmed Dogan during a party conference in January 2013. We have therefore rated the claim miscaptioned.
We found no credible reports of such an attack on Netanyahu. He remained politically active following Israel’s Oct. 27 election and delivered a speech in Jerusalem the following day.
What we know about the video
On Jan. 19, 2013, Dogan, then the leader of Bulgaria’s Movement for Rights and Freedoms party, was giving a speech in Sofia when a man came onto the stage and pointed a gas pistol at his head. The gun did not fire, and Dogan was not injured. Security guards and other people at the conference then stopped the attacker, according to reporting by the BBC and bTV, a Bulgarian broadcaster. The Guardian also shared footage of the incident.
Although a thumbnail attached to the circulating video appeared to show Netanyahu (see screenshot below), the footage of the attack itself didn’t.
(X user @AsifAli_Haider)
The video’s low quality also made it difficult to identify the person in the footage, which may have made the claim more believable to social media users.
This was not the first time social media users falsely linked the video to Netanyahu. In 2024, Reuters, AFP and Soch Fact Check debunked posts claiming the footage showed Netanyahu being attacked by members of Israel’s parliament. Similar claims were debunked again in April 2026. When the video resurfaced in October, fact-checking outlet Lead Stories also investigated it.
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