Satirical Blog Post Shared as News of Israel PM Netanyahu’s Psychiatrist’s Death

The contents of the viral claim are taken from a satirical blog, which shared this in a post in June 2010.

Social media users are sharing posts which claim that one Dr Moshe Yatom, who allegedly was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's psychiatrist, reportedly died by suicide and left a letter, holding Netanyahu responsible for his demise.

(Archives of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, and here.)

But...?: We found no credible reports corroborating any death of this kind.

• The story has been around since 2010, when it was published on a satirical blog.

How did we find out?: We looked for news reports regarding Yatom's demise, but did not find any credible reports on the incident mentioned in the claim.

• However, we came across a website which had shared the same story with the details mentioned in the claim in 2010.

• Taking a cue from this, we used the date filter on Google search to look for the origin of this claim.

• This led us to a blog post on a website called 'legalienate', which was published on 6 June 2010, and carried the same details.

• The website noted that it published "news, commentary and satire".

• It mentioned that it was authored by one Michael K Smith.

On browsing the blog, we saw that it had shared two more posts about psychiatrists' deaths in Israel.

• The first one, published on 15 June, claims that former Israeli Defense minister Ehud Barak's psychiatrist, Yigal Peleg, had also died by suicide.

• The second blog post mentioned that Israel had bombed a flotilla of psychiatrists who were "attempting to bring elephant tranquillizers to increasingly rabid Israeli leaders" off the coast of Cyprus.

• All three blog posts about the deaths of Israeli psychiatrists were written by the same author, Michael K Smith.

Responding to an email query by Associated Press, Smith confirmed that the blog was satire, and its purpose was to "draw attention to the hopeless insanity of Israeli policy in an entertaining way."

Conclusion: A 13-year-old satirical blog post is being shared to falsely claim that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's psychiatrist died by suicide.

(With inputs from Abhilash Mallick and Associated Press.)

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