A poster for the 2007 Hallmark Channel miniseries, "Pandemic"
that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu shared a video with members of his cabinet, which he believed to be proof of an Iranian coronavirus cover-up. It turns out that it was actually a clip from the 2007 Hallmark Channel mini-series
Pandemic.Two Israeli Cabinet ministers told reporter Barak Ravid that Netanyahu had informed them that he'd personally seen proof that Iran was concealing the full extent of the COVID-19 crisis in their country.
He said that national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat had shown him a video of Iranian soldiers putting dead bodies in trucks and throwing them into garbage dumps.
The 2007 series starred Faye Dunaway, Tiffani Thiessen, French Stewart and Eric Roberts. In the show, a fictional offshoot of the "bird flu" rocks Los Angeles.
"The prime minister's office didn't deny this account," wrote Ravid, "It said the video had only been sent to three Cabinet ministers who requested it and were told it came from social media and its authenticity was unclear."
Comment: Sputnik
reports:
He showed it to illustrate his "assertions that Iran was being untruthful about the real consequences of coronavirus," Raz Zimmit, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, told Ynet.
Netanyahu's office later realised, however, that the clip was taken from Pandemic, a mini-series about an unknown virus infecting Los Angeles, which aired on the Hallmark Channel in 2007.
The prime minister allegedly said that he had been shown the clip by the chief of the National Security Council. It appears to have been shared by users with Arab-language nicknames on social media in the days before Monday's briefing, which could explain how it came to the attention of Israeli security officials.
Notably, Netanyahu's office did not deny the story, but said that it showed the footage only to three ministers and made it clear that the clip was found on social media and its authenticity was unclear.
Iran has reported 47,593 coronavirus cases and 3,036 deaths as of Wednesday, although some officials within the country have accused the government of underreporting the real death count. Tehran has denied covering up the full extent of the outbreak.
Comment: Sputnik reports: