Is Netanyahu Already a Ghost Running Israel’s War on Iran?

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

What if the man ordering airstrikes on Iran is already a ghost, and the world is being asked to clap along to a hologram?

On the morning of 28 February 2026, as a salvo of Iranian missiles began slamming into Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to vanish into a fog of war that felt less like leadership and more like stagecraft. Within days, Tehran’s media were suggesting the Israeli prime minister had been killed or was gravely wounded, with outlets like Tasnim News Agency pushing the story, while Jerusalem briskly dismissed it all as “a lie.”

Between these poles of information warfare, sits a stranger story of a loitering “flying fortress”,  Tel Aviv apartment blocks built atop buried command centres, Netanyahu’s personal doctor doing hasbara on Romanian TV, and a coffee shop video so synthetic that even Elon Musk’s Grok called it a deepfake.

IMAGE: Emergency workers walk near the missile strike crater and clear a damaged building after the missile strike on February 28, 2026, in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Source: by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

The trail begins on 28 February 2026, when an Iranian missile hit a residential tower in Tel Aviv, killing a foreign caregiver and injuring more than twenty people. Western networks repeated the familiar script of Israeli victimhood. Almost none mentioned that Tel Aviv’s urban core has been deliberately wired into Israel’s military and intelligence infrastructure. Complexes from the Kirya to the underground “Pit” or “Fortress of Zion”, and discreet sites such as the alleged “Site 81” beneath civilian towers, have long been documented or hinted at by planners and journalists. In that landscape, the line between apartment and bunker is not a moral truth, it is an architectural illusion. When a missile tears through a tower in the heart of this grid, it is not far‑fetched to ask what else, and who else, might have been in the blast radius.

Our reconstruction of the day’s timeline does more than leave the medevac scenario open; it actively supports it as a plausible reading of how Israel protects its leader when the missiles start flying. Iran’s first warheads began hitting Israeli territory late on the morning of 28 February, with the first incoming missiles recorded at 09:05 UTC and “missile strikes confirmed in Israel” at 10:15 UTC (12:15 p.m. local time), according to consolidated Iran war timelines and daily security updates. A detailed daily log from an Israeli security think tank similarly notes confirmed impacts in central Israel around late morning to early afternoon, hours before the nighttime blast that tore through the Tel Aviv apartment block. In that window, Netanyahu could have been caught in, or near, an early wave of incoming fire and moved quickly into the evacuation chain.

The same afternoon, his dedicated state jet, the Wing of Zion, a Boeing 767 built out as an airborne bunker with an emergency operating room and staffed in normal times by a hand‑picked team of specialists led by Dr Zvi Herman Berkovits, lifted off from Israel, circled over the Mediterranean, off the shores of Israel for several hours, and then continued to Berlin, where officials quietly told reporters it was being parked “for safety” with only crew on board and no officials. Taken together, the timing of the first Iranian impacts, the known capabilities of the aircraft, and its same‑day relocation to Germany are entirely consistent with a discreet medevac for a wounded prime minister, not just a symbolic repositioning of an empty plane. We do not have CCTV of a stretcher on the tarmac; we do have a warhead window that fits, a flying intensive‑care unit that launches straight through it, and a government that offers no convincing alternative explanation beyond a bland press line and a pre‑recorded war message from Netanyahu’s office pushed out that day by the Government Press Office.

VIDEO: Netanyahu’s Wing of Zion’s strange Feb 28  flight – Israel’s State jet loiters off the coast of Israel, almost returns to Nevatim Air Base, before flying to Berlin, Germany (Source: Benjamin Alvarez | X)

“Wing of Zion,” the Boeing 767-300 Israeli government plane, took off from Nevatim Air Base and remained off the coast of Israel for hours before continuing on to Berlin. pic.twitter.com/FmunXbTOhr

— Benjamin Alvarez (@BenjAlvarez1) March 1, 2026

The human detail makes that possibility impossible to ignore. A Freedom of Information request in 2025 forced the Israeli state to admit that Netanyahu rarely flies without a hand‑picked medical entourage. At its centre is his long‑time personal physician, Dr Zvi Herman Berkovits, a paediatrician who has shadowed him for years and signs off on his carefully worded health bulletins. Around him are cardiologist Dr Zvi Sirotkin, brought in after Netanyahu received a pacemaker, urologist Prof Mordechai Duvdevani, linked to his prostate and urinary problems, and orthopaedic surgeon Dr Eyal Heller. These are not decorative titles. This is the kind of team you assemble if you intend to keep one ageing man alive inside a war zone, up to and including major surgery in mid‑air. Put that team, that aircraft and that four‑hour loiter in the same frame as a Tel Aviv strike on a dual‑use neighbourhood, and the Berlin “parking” line no longer feels like an answer. It feels like the start of a list of questions.

On or around March 9, Iranian media outlets like Tasnim started to speculate on the status of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They suggested that he might have been killed or gravely injured, referencing unnamed “intelligence sources” and noting his abrupt absence from the public eye. On 2 March, the IRGC claimed it had hit his office in Tel Aviv with Kheibar missiles. Yet Iran’s claims do not absolve Israel of its own sleight of hand. In fact, they make genuine transparency more urgent. When both sides see the physical state of one man as a weapon, the only honest position is to demand evidence from those who hold the hospital charts, not from those who invent victory posters.

Israel’s answer has been a study in managed ambiguity. Netanyahu was conspicuously absent from at least one key war or security cabinet meeting in mid-March, where his top security chiefs gathered without him for the first time in this crisis. On 2 March, the very day the IRGC confirmed a strike had hit his office, Dr Berkovits appeared on the Romanian channel Digi24 to “reassure” viewers. He briskly declared the Iranian story “all a lie” and insisted Netanyahu was “absolutely healthy, he has nothing.” Then the medicine vanished. For the rest of the segment, the prime minister’s doctor morphed into a government spokesman, extolling Israeli “optimism,” describing a population “very happy in a way” even as schools close under rocket fire, and boasting that the war is “coordinated with America.” No dates, no scans, no test results, no independent colleague. Just patriotic mood music from the one man who would know if his patient was lying in a Berlin ICU.

VIDEO: Herman Berkovits: “We live in tension, but people are very happy in a way” – Digi24, 2 March 2026. (Source: Digi24HD)

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When that failed to kill the rumours, Israel reached for the oldest trick in its hasbara playbook, a friendly piece of theatre. On 15 March, the Prime Minister’s Office released a breezy video of Netanyahu in a Jerusalem coffee shop, joking about “dying for coffee” and chatting with staff. It was meant to be casual, human, and undeniable. Instead, it became a case study in the new information disorder. Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, prompted to analyse the clip, declared it “100 percent AI generated”, pointing to supposed glitches in lip movements and a mysteriously static coffee level. Indian and other channels ran with the deepfake claim, while others tried to fact‑check the fact‑check, pointing to the visible date on the till and smoother frame analysis. But the damage was done. In a media environment awash with synthetic imagery and a state apparatus that has lied for decades about massacres from Gaza to Qana, even a simple café video becomes another contested artefact. It does not restore trust. It just underlines how little of it is left.

A responsible journalist does not declare a man dead without hard proof. The open record still leans towards Netanyahu being alive, selectively deployed, and central to a war on Iran that is already killing civilians across the region. But a responsible journalist also does not treat Israeli spin as gospel. What we see instead is a nuclear‑armed state, with a long documented history of disinformation and psychological warfare, asking the world to take on faith that its Zionist leader is firmly at the helm, while offering no unscripted press conferences, no transparent medical bulletins, and no proof of life beyond a meme‑ready video that AI itself does not trust.

For Palestinians, Iranians and the wider region, this is not a parlour game about one man’s heartbeat. It is about accountability for a war machine that has flattened Gaza, bombed Damascus and now drags West Asia to the brink under the cover of “self defense”. If Israel wants to keep launching missiles in their name, Israelis have the right to know who is actually giving the orders.

Until Israel produces clear, independently verifiable proof of Netanyahu’s condition, its narrative has earned not trust but doubt. In a war such as the one in Iran, the burden of proof does not rest with families digging loved ones out of the ruins. It rests squarely with the state that rains down bombs on Tehran and still expects the world to accept its leader’s carefully staged, glitching image as “proof of life” following a retaliatory surgical strike.

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21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.

Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2026/03/17/is-netanyahu-already-a-ghost-running-israels-war-on-iran/