Does a viral video show a life-threatening attack on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu one day after the Oct. 27, 2026, election? No, that's not true: The low quality of the video obscured that it showed a different politician giving a speech in a different country in 2013. It was Ahmed Dogan attacked in Bulgaria.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) by @AsifAli_Haider on Oct. 28, 2026. It opened:
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. Don't remove my video X Twitter
This is what a screenshot of the video looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @AsifAli_Haider on X.)
The claim emerged on social media when Israel was still counting votes (archived here) cast in its Oct. 27, 2026, election (archived here).
The blurry 18-second clip included a fairly clear thumbnail depicting Netanyahu speaking in front of the wall with a Hebrew inscription. The opening frame, however, showed an acronym written in a Cyrillic alphabet:
(Image source: post by @AsifAli_Haider on X.)
(Image source: post by @AsifAli_Haider on X.)
A reverse image search found a Jan. 20, 2013, BBC report about the incident (archived here). That article, which featured a better-quality version of the video, reported that the footage showed an attack on Bulgarian politician Ahmed Dogan. He escaped unharmed.
At the time, Dogan was the leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms whose acronym -- MRF -- is written as ДПС in Bulgarian (archived here), the party's website confirms.
Screenshots of the video the BBC used in its report as well as those of other media outlets (archived here) demonstrate that the person at the podium bore no resemblance to Netanyahu:
(Image source: BBC.)
A broad search across sites indexed by Google News (archived here) showed no media reports confirming any reports of a similar attack on Netanyahu on Oct. 28, 2026.
