US Press
Netanyahu names Abbas an enemy in an AI campaign video
US PressGraphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted an AI-generated video on Thursday naming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as figures celebrating his hoped-for election defeat, the New York Times reported.
The video opens with a Mamdani character phoning an Erdoğan character to ask about a party marking Netanyahu's fall; Erdoğan says he is bringing Khamenei, shown on a hospital bed saying "finally, we will overthrow Netanyahu." An Abbas character says he is already "five minutes from Kfar Saba," an Israeli city. When the fictional broadcast instead reports a Netanyahu win, Mamdani cancels the party and the other characters retreat.
Why the pairing matters#
The video groups the elected Palestinian Authority president with Iran's supreme leader and a foreign head of state as interchangeable enemies, ahead of the 27 October Knesset election in which Netanyahu's own bloc trails in several published polls. The Times reported the video as part of Netanyahu's broader use of AI-generated content to frame political rivals and foreign leaders as a unified threat.
What the video does not show#
Neither the video nor Netanyahu's office, per the Times's report, offered any factual basis linking Abbas, Mamdani, Erdoğan and Khamenei to a shared position or communication — the pairing is a campaign device, not a documented claim, and this outlet reports it as one.
