Netanyahu is suing two journalists and an activist for libel

At lawsuit hearing, Netanyahu accuses journalist of seeking to expose him to danger

PM says Uri Misgav is ‘obsessed’ with revealing his location in real-time so that Iran targets him; claims he’s more open with medical reports than other premiers have been

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Thursday that a journalist who has repeatedly published real-time details about his whereabouts is 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 and lawyer 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 insisted that Misgav had made the claims, but admitted he could not point out exactly where it was mentioned in the court papers.

Lieblich also asked about Netanyahu’s claim, made in a May hearing, that his health is in the top 10th percentile compared to his peers.

Netanyahu cited a test at the Hadassah Medical Center and assured that the conclusion “was not fabricated.”

“Hadassah Hospital did not fabricate. Three doctors and three nurses were not complicit in the delusions that characterize Mr. Misgav’s writing,” he said, accusing the media at some point of spreading rumors about his health just because he “didn’t sleep for a few hours” before giving a recent interview.

“No prime minister has given more accurate and complete reports about his health than I have,” he asserted.

Netanyahu was also quizzed by Attorney Raz Ben Dor, representing Caspit, who said that at the end of the previous hearing, they had reached a framework to end the case against his client.

Ben Dor put it to Netanyahu that Caspit’s reporting did not say anything about the prime minister being terminally ill.

Netanyahu responded that Caspit had asserted that “I am not fit and a danger.”

Challenged that the danger was a political one, Netanyahu said: “He meant problems with functioning.”

In the lawsuit, Netanyahu claims the defendants “spread false and malicious information against the prime minister,” over a series of May 2024 reports.

Ben Yitzhak claimed at the time to have received information that Netanyahu had been treated for pancreatic cancer; Misgav raised questions about his health over an undeclared visit to Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital; and Caspit reported that retired IDF general Amiram Levin, after meeting Netanyahu, had gotten the impression the prime minister was “unfit [to serve in his role] and dangerous to the state.”

In March 2024, the premier was put under full anesthesia to undergo surgery for a hernia. That same month, he missed several days of work after contracting the flu.

In 2023, he underwent surgery to have a pacemaker installed after suffering a transient heart block. The surgery came a week after he was hospitalized for what he said at the time was dehydration.

The incident led to speculation regarding the prime minister’s health and to what degree details had been hidden from the public.

In April of this year, Netanyahu shared that he had undergone successful treatment for prostate cancer. In a previous court hearing in his libel lawsuit, the premier said he had been diagnosed toward the end of 2025 and underwent five treatments for radiation therapy in January and February of this year, and that these treatments totally eradicated the cancer.

Until the document shared in April, the last time Netanyahu had published an annual health report was in December 2023. Before that, the last such document he published was for 2016, according to the Movement for Freedom of Information.