An op-ed in the Independent (The views of the Arab citizens of Israel must be heard in the country’s latest election, Jan. 6th) included the following claim:
“As the [Sept. 2019] election dawned, Netanyahu took to Facebook to claim that “Arabs want to destroy us”, a post that saw him banned from the platform for a time.”
This is not accurate.
As their own reporter wrote at the time, the prime minister denied that he wrote those words. Further, it was the bot chat function on the prime minister’s Facebook page that was temporarily banned, not the prime minister himself.
Our complaint was upheld, and the paragraph was revised:
As the election dawned, Netanyahu apparently took to Facebook to claim that “Arabs want to destroy us”, a post that saw a chat function on his account banned from the platform for a time. The Israeli prime minister has denied writing the post; in an interview with Kan Reshet Bet radio, Mr Netanyahu suggested that a staffer’s mistake was responsible.
The following addendum was added: