Benjamin Netanyahu

Sources: Wikipedia, UN OHCHR (Commission of Inquiry), Wikipedia, Wikipedia, The Intercept

Lebanon: on his watch, on his orders

He was prime minister for every month of it. His government sent the army into South Lebanon on 1 October 2024, and a week later he went on camera to warn the Lebanese of 'destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza'. He delivered it. By the November 2024 ceasefire about 1.2 million people had been driven from their homes and more than 4,000 were dead.

Then he refused to leave. Israel ignored the withdrawal deadline and kept five hilltops, and in March 2026 he turned them into an occupation zone: 'I have just instructed to further expand the existing security buffer zone,' he said on 29 March. By the summer it covered 570 to 700 km². On 26 June he said what it is for: 'We are not allowing Hezbollah, nor the Lebanese population to enter that area.' His military minister, Israel Katz, boasted of razing 24 villages, 'not house by house, but entire villages'. UN experts said the destruction 'points to ethnic cleansing' of the Shia south.

The toll under his government: 8,953 killed and 30,643 wounded by 17 September 2026, according to Lebanon's health ministry. The full record is in the South Lebanon case file.

Sources: aljazeera.com, abcnews.com, arabnews.pk, aljazeera.com, timesofisrael.com, timesofisrael.com, ohchr.org, english.palinfo.com

Iran: four decades of "soon"

Then there is Iran, Netanyahu's favourite apocalypse, now in roughly its fourth decade of coming "soon". In 1992 he told the Knesset that "within three to five years" Iran could build a bomb, and his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism repeated the forecast. In 2002 he went before a US congressional committee to push for the invasion of Iraq and warn of an Iraqi and Iranian race for the bomb.

In September 2012 he stood at the UN General Assembly holding a cartoon bomb with a red line drawn on it and predicted: "By next spring, at most by next summer." For decades he stood before cameras, Congresses and diagrams explaining that Iran was always somewhere between "almost there" and "we must attack immediately".

Thirty years of countdown clocks later, in the early hours of 13 June 2025, Israel launched the strikes that opened the Twelve-Day War. The United States bombed Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on 22 June. Iran's death toll is estimated at between 1,060 and 1,190. In early 2026 Netanyahu lobbied Donald Trump for a joint strike targeting Iran's leadership, and on 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel went to war with Iran again.

Sources: aljazeera.com, theintercept.com, en.wikipedia.org, Wikipedia

The warrant

On 21 November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former military minister Yoav Gallant. The judges found reasonable grounds to believe that, from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, both men bore criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts.

The response was to attack the court. In February 2025 the Trump administration imposed asset freezes and travel bans on ICC personnel. During Netanyahu's April 2025 visit to Budapest, Viktor Orbán announced that Hungary would leave the court.

Sources: news.un.org, Wikipedia

The incitement finding

On 16 September 2025 the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed four of the five genocidal acts listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention.

It also found that President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-military minister Yoav Gallant "have incited the commission of genocide", and that Israeli authorities had failed to punish them.

Sources: UN OHCHR (Commission of Inquiry)

The defendant

Netanyahu has been under indictment since 21 November 2019 for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and his trial opened on 24 May 2020. Case 1000 alleges that he and his wife received cigars, champagne and jewellery worth about $195,000 from the businessmen Arnon Milchan and James Packer. Case 2000 alleges that he discussed favourable coverage in Yedioth Ahronoth with its publisher Arnon Mozes in exchange for legislation to hobble the rival paper Israel Hayom. Case 4000, the bribery count, alleges that he granted regulatory favours to Bezeq's owner Shaul Elovitch in return for flattering coverage on Elovitch's site Walla.

He began testifying in December 2024. On 30 November 2025 he asked President Herzog for a pardon, after a letter from Donald Trump urging clemency. In April 2026 Herzog deferred the request and pushed for a plea deal.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org, upi.com

The Oracle seat

In September 2021 Haaretz reported that Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, had offered Netanyahu a seat on Oracle's board. The offer was estimated at some $450,000, and Netanyahu would have had to leave the Knesset to take it. Netanyahu denied the report.

The month before, he had holidayed on Ellison's Hawaiian island of Lanai, even though Ellison is one of several hundred prosecution witnesses in his corruption trial.

Sources: thejewishindependent.com.au, The Intercept, en.wikipedia.org

The paymaster

Netanyahu negotiated and celebrated the 2016 memorandum of understanding: $38B over ten years, about $3.8B a year, mostly spent on US-made arms. He called it "the largest military aid package the US has ever given out to any nation". When Congress passed $17B in military aid for Israel in April 2024, he posted: "Thank you friends, thank you America!" Two months later he publicly accused Washington of withholding weapons and demanded: "give us the tools and we'll finish the job a lot faster". Brown University's Costs of War Project puts US military aid to Israel from October 2023 to September 2025 at $21.7B.

At home, in December 2025 he announced NIS 350B (about $110B) over ten years to build Israel's own arms industry, much of which is state-owned Rafael and IAI. In March 2026, with the Iran war under way, his cabinet added NIS 32B ($10.4B) to the military budget. The Knesset then passed a record NIS 142B for the Israel Ministry of Defense. The Bank of Israel puts the fiscal cost of the wars from 2023 to 2026 at about NIS 350B, roughly half of it borrowed. As prime minister he draws about NIS 59,000 a month.

Sources: timesofisrael.com, timesofisrael.com, axios.com, United States Spending on Israel's Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, malaymail.com, bloomberg.com, timesofisrael.com, jpost.com, timesofisrael.com

In their words

Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.

— Benjamin Netanyahu, Knesset, 1992

By next spring, at most by next summer … they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage.

— Benjamin Netanyahu, UN General Assembly, 2012

We have operated with impressive success in thwarting Iran from establishing a military foothold in Syria, in the framework of which the military has struck hundreds of times against Iranian and Hezbollah targets.

— Benjamin Netanyahu, cabinet meeting, 13 January 2019

give us the tools and we'll finish the job a lot faster

— Benjamin Netanyahu, video, 18 June 2024

Thank you friends, thank you America!

— Benjamin Netanyahu, on the April 2024 US aid package

I approved a total of 350 billion shekels over the coming decade to build an independent arms industry for the State of Israel

— Benjamin Netanyahu, 25 December 2025

ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly

— Yoav Gallant, 9 October 2023

It's an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware or not involved.

— Isaac Herzog, October 2023

Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.

— Bezalel Smotrich, 5 August 2024

If Khamenei continues to fire missiles at the Israeli home front, Tehran will burn.

— Israel Katz, 14 June 2025

The only thing that should enter Gaza as long as Hamas doesn't release the hostages it holds is not a gram of humanitarian aid, but hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force.

— Itamar Ben Gvir, 17 October 2023