Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Thursday that a journalist who has repeatedly published real-time details about his whereabouts was deliberately endangering his life and that of his family by exposing him to potential Iranian attacks.

Netanyahu made the assertions during a hearing at the Tel Aviv District Court in a libel suit he filed against two journalists and a political activist for claiming he was suffering from various serious diseases in 2024.

Netanyahu sued journalists Ben Caspit and Uri Misgav, as well as activist Gonen Ben Yitzhak, in 2024, alleging the three had spread lies about his health. The prime minister is seeking compensation of up to NIS 500,000 ($135,000).

Netanyahu said of Misgav: “He’s obsessed, he has no control over himself.”

“Misgav reveals my location in real-time. It seems he has some kind of obsession,” he said. “To expose us to a direct mortal danger.”

During cross-examination by Misgav’s attorney, Tali Lieblich, the premier accused the staunchly anti-Netanyahu Haaretz journalist of being “very radical. He spreads around the location of my son and my wife. There are entities and proxies who are looking for that information and use it to try to fatally target them. That is radical in my opinion.”

The prime minister also defended keeping some hospital visits secret, explaining that it is for security reasons. He said he has not sued others who reported on the visits, unlike Misgav, because there was no defamation in the reports.

Lieblich focused on the nature of the lawsuit, putting it to the prime minister that her client had never written that he had pancreatic cancer or that he was terminally ill, and accused Netanyahu of not being familiar with the details of the lawsuit he had filed.

Netanyahu........

© The Times of Israel