Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday shared a social media post featuring a simulated nuclear explosion over what appears to be Tel Aviv, just two days before Israel's election.
Netanyahu reposted a message by Yuval Bloomberg, adding, "Read Yuval Bloomberg's important words. Qatar, the ultra-Orthodox, Urich, the draft, warnings. It's all one giant smokescreen designed to conceal the one issue that towers above everything else," Bloomberg wrote, referring to controversies surrounding the government, including the Qatargate affair, Netanyahu aide Jonatan Urich and the military draft exemption for ultra-Orthodox men. "If two atomic bombs fall on central Israel, who will care about all these meaningless controversies?"
"The State of Israel faces a real and tangible existential threat. If the Iranians obtain nuclear weapons, nothing else will matter anymore," the post continued, adding, "We have two more years of Trump to finish the job in Iran, and there's no telling what will happen afterward."
Yet the threat Netanyahu is now invoking is the very same threat he previously declared had been eliminated. In June 2025, at the end of the 12-day war against Iran, known as Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu proclaimed a "historic victory" that he said would "stand for generations."
"We removed two existential threats: The threat of annihilation by nuclear weapons and the threat of annihilation by 20,000 ballistic missiles," he declared, adding that Israel's actions had "sent Iran's nuclear program down the drain."
תקראו את הדברים החשובים של יובל בלומברג:
מדינת ישראל נמצאת בסכנה קיומית אמיתית ומוחשית. אם האיראנים ישיגו גרעין, שום דבר כבר לא ישנה יותר. הכל כל כך טפל אל מול הסכנה הקיומית של איראן והציר השיעי.
הסערות המבוימות והמומצאות חדשות לבקרים נועדו להסיט את תשומת הלב מהדבר האחד שהוא החשוב ביותר: סיום העבודה באיראן.
זה נוגע בקיום הפיזי של כל אדם ואדם כאן.
יש לנו עוד שנתיים של טראמפ לסיים את העבודה באיראן, ואין לדעת מה יהיה לאחר מכן, אם זו תהיה קמאלה האריס, או תואם מאמדני כלשהו.
זה חלון הזמן שנותר לנו כדי להשלים את העבודה הנדרשת כדי להבטיח את הקיום הפיזי שלנו לשנים הבאות. כל משאבי המדינה הנדרשים, צריכים להיות מושקעים במשימה הזו.
קטאר, חרדים, אוריך, גיוס, התראות.
הכל מסך עשן ענקי כדי להסתיר את הנושא היחיד שניצב מעל כולם בפער.
אם יפלו במרכז הארץ שתי פצצות אטום, את מי יעניינו כל סערות הסרק האלה?הדורות הבאים לא יסלחו לנו אם נפספס את חלון ההזדמנויות ההיסטורי שמאפשר לנו לנסות ולהשלים את המשימה הקריטית ביותר שעומדת בפני הדור שלנו.
זה לא יקרה עם ראש ממשלה שמוחזק בצווארו על ידי האחים המוסלמים וסייעני הטרור.
זה לא יקרה עם ראש ממשלה שלא מסוגל להרים את הטלפון ולנהל שיחה אינטימית רציפה עם טראמפ.
זה לא יקרה עם ראש ממשלה שלא מסוגל לעמוד בלחץ של ראיון טלויזיה.
השינאה לנתניהו, ככל שהיא עולם ומלואו עבור מחנה שלם, לא תעזור מול הגרעין האיראני.
כל אחד שדואג לקיום הפיזי שלו, של משפחתו, ושל אהוביו, ידו צריכה לרעוד לפני שהוא בוחר במישהו שלא יהיה מסוגל להשלים את המשימה, ובכך לדון את עצמו ואת משפחתו לסכנה של שואה שניה, בגלל השינאה הפוליטית שלו או בגלל סערת דמה מטופשת וחסרת חשיבות.
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 25, 2026
Nuclear facilities 'completely obliterated'
The following day, Netanyahu repeated the claim at a government meeting. "By this victory we have removed two immediate existential threats in order to ensure the eternity of Israel," he said.
Within months, however, Netanyahu was once again warning about Iran's nuclear program. "I agreed with Trump: We will not allow Iran to rebuild its missile industry or its nuclear program," he told the Knesset in early January.
On Feb. 28, just eight months after the victory that was supposed to "stand for generations," Israel and the US launched Operation Roaring Lion, another military campaign against Iran. "In recent months, the tyrants in Iran have been plotting to rebuild their nuclear and missile capabilities and bury them underground," Netanyahu explained at the time.
The US administration was forced into a similar reversal. After American B-2 bombers struck Fordow and other Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, US President Donald Trump insisted that the sites had been "completely obliterated" and that the US had set Iran's nuclear program back by decades. "I don't see Iran getting back into the nuclear business again," he added.
Yet in early March, just days after Operation Roaring Lion began, Trump was already claiming, "If we didn't hit within two weeks, they would have had a nuclear weapon."
Even after Operation Roaring Lion ended, Iran was still believed to possess approximately 440 kilograms (970 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60%, according to estimates by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog. Roughly half of that material was believed to be stored in an underground complex in Isfahan.
It was the same stockpile that a senior Israeli security official had briefed journalists about following Operation Rising Lion. At the time, the official said there was no reason for concern that the material had survived, insisting that any Iranian attempt to move it would "almost certainly" be detected.
Netanyahu's rhetoric subsequently shifted from eliminating the threat to merely pushing it further away. "We have pushed this dual existential threat away from us," he said in April, as a ceasefire took effect.
In June, after the US and Iran reached an agreement, he repeated the formulation: "We have pushed away the danger of imminent annihilation."
On that occasion, he also denied ever having defined the elimination of the threat as the war's objective. "I know what I defined," he said. "The goal was to push the nuclear existential threat away from us, and we achieved that."
As the current election campaign approached, Netanyahu once again began emphasizing the Iranian threat. His message now is that he needs another two years in office alongside Trump to finish the job. On Oct. 18, after the US president endorsed him, Netanyahu urged Israelis to vote for him "so that in the next two years, and perhaps sooner, we can complete the elimination of the Iranian threat."
"That is the biggest consideration," he added. "All the other issues, there are important issues, but this is about our very existence."
Occasionally, however, Netanyahu still returns to his earlier position. "The panic-mongering media ignore it. They don't tell you, they don't tell you, they don't tell you that we eliminated the nuclear program, that we eliminated Nasrallah, that we eliminated Deif, Sinwar and Haniyeh," he said on Channel 14's The Patriots on Oct. 13, referring to slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leaders Mohammed Deif, Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh.
Opposition leaders were quick to condemn Netanyahu's latest post. "Netanyahu, you're hysterical. As in every election campaign, it's the same old tactic of lies and fearmongering. This time, you're threatening Israeli citizens with mass annihilation. And that's after you failed to achieve the objectives of the war in Iran," wrote Gadi Eisenkot, chairman of the Yashar! party and former IDF chief of staff.
Democrats party chairman Yair Golan wrote, "The prime minister of Israel has posted an image of an atomic bomb falling on Tel Aviv. I ask that he be kept away from social media. The man and those around him have lost it."
