Posts falsely claim Netanyahu video fabricated to cover up his death

After Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Israeli public about the military campaign against Iran, a video purportedly showing the prime minister with an extra finger on his right hand circulated in posts claiming it was AI-generated and proof that his death was being covered up. The higher-quality version posted by the Israeli government, however, does not show Netanyahu with six fingers and he has made public appearances in the days since the video circulated.

“Netanyahu’s latest video has raised doubts that the footage was generated by artificial intelligence because he appears to have six fingers,” says part of a simplified Chinese Weibo post shared on March 14, 2026.

“The question now is whether Netanyahu is actually hiding, has already been killed, or is seriously wounded.”

Attached to the post is a short clip of the Israeli prime minister speaking, which has been slowed down and annotated to supposedly show Netanyahu has six fingers on his right hand.

Such distortions were among the most common anomalies used to identify AI-generated content, particularly in the early days of consumer-grade generative AI. While these anomalies may still occur, they are becoming less and less common as generative AI software improves.

Two screenshots from the clip are also included in the post highlighting perceived anomalies with his hands.

The clip was also shared in similar Chinese Threads, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram posts, as well as in other languages.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency also published an article on March 10 about speculation that the Israeli prime minister had either died or been injured (archived link).

But the circulating video does not show Netanyahu with six fingers on his right hand, and he has appeared in public in the days since the posts circulated.

Netanyahu’s official account on X addressed the speculation in a March 15 video showing the Israeli leader at a cafe joking about the rumours and holding up his hands to the camera (archived link).

Another video released on March 17 shows Netanyahu announcing that Israel had “eliminated” Iran’s security chief Ali Larijani (archived link).

The Israeli prime minister again referenced the rumours of his death at a March 19 press conference, telling the assembled reporters: “First of all, I want to say that I am alive, and you are all witnesses to that” (archived link).

AFP distributed pool photos of Netanyahu at a media briefing on March 19, while photo agency Getty released photos of him at the site of an Iranian missile strike in southern Israel on March 22 (archived here and here).

Press conference remarks

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the video shared in the false posts led to an Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) YouTube video from March 13 (archived link).

The video, titled “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Remarks at his Press Conference”, shows Netanyahu addressing citizens about the joint US-Israeli military campaign against Iran.

The false posts used a short extract from the GPO video starting from its 31-second mark. It shows that Netanyahu’s supposed “sixth finger” is actually his palm.

A frame-by-frame analysis of the clip shows that at no point does Netanyahu appear to have more than five fingers on each hand, even if his hand at times appears slightly blurry.

“There is quite some movement with the hands, and in any video, because the frames change very fast,” said Evangelos Kanoulas, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Amsterdam (archived link).

“You can take a screenshot and you may hit a point in which there is a swap in the frames, all it takes is a screenshot at the moment when the camera cuts from one shot to another, especially if the video is compressed, because it loses quality and therefore definition and detail,” he said on March 17.

Henry Ajder, an expert in synthetic content and deepfakes, also dismissed posts claiming the appearance of six fingers on Netanyahu’s hand as proof of a conspiracy to hide the Israeli prime minister’s death or injury (archived link).

“The Israeli government and the Israeli intelligence services are some of the most sophisticated in the world,” Ajder said, “If they were going to do this, they would not make as simple and as obvious a mistake as that.”

AI detection models

Some internet users turned to AI detection tools, sometimes obtaining results indicating that all or part of the video was created using AI.

AFP ran several versions of the video — obtained from different social media platforms and with varying degrees of compression — through the Hive Moderation tool — one of the most popular AI detectors (archived link).

The results ranged from 0.1 to eight percent certainty of AI generation.

Kanoulas explained that results can vary depending on the degree of video compression and the type of analysis used.

“Generally speaking, deep fakes leave traces, so it is not impossible to figure out whether something is a deep fake,” he said, adding it is worth conducting this type of analysis.

He also suggested looking at how suspect videos are disseminated and whether or not the source is trustworthy, and analysing the original video instead of a compressed version that has been uploaded.

AFP has previously debunked other misinformation related to Netanyahu.