Do social media posts prove that the Israeli Prime Minister's office reused a photo originally published on Feb. 4, 2026? No, that's not true: The claim appears to have been based on a known Google image search glitch, not evidence of photo reuse. The photo was not part of an article about Spain published on Feb. 4, 2026. Lead Stories found no examples of the photo being used before the current U.S.-Israel military operation against Iran began on Feb. 28, 2026.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here and here) published on X on March 17, 2026. It opened:
The Israeli Prime Minister's office has reused a photo originally published on February 4th, 2026.
The entry cited another post (archived here and here) published earlier that day on the same social media platform by the official account of the Israeli prime minister. It showed a photo whose caption read:
Photo: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordering the elimination of senior Iranian regime officials.
This is what the photo in question looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: screenshot of post by @Lowkey0nline on X.)
Around the same time, a second social media user published a post (archived here) in which they appeared to argue that the screenshot below proved the photo's original publication date:
(Image source: screenshot of post by @iamuyiri on X.)
The date of Feb. 4, 2026, underscored in red in the screenshot above, appeared with an article's headline in Hebrew. Lead Stories searched that headline using its original language and found a piece (archived here) published on that day by Haaretz. As translated to English by Google Chrome, the article's title said:
While other countries close the door on them, Spain swims against the current.
The piece made no mention of Netanyahu -- his name only appeared three times on the same page below it:
(Image source: screenshot from Haaretz.)
Earlier in the day on March 17, 2026, the bottom of the page showed another story illustrated by the phone picture:
(Image source: Haaretz.)
When the same Feb. 4, 2026, article was saved at a different time, the bottom of the page showed a different set of materials that only mentioned the Israeli prime minister once:
(Image source: Haaretz.)
This suggested that the content shown at the bottom of the page was periodically updated, and that those materials carried publication dates (archived here) different from the Spain article. In such cases, a reverse image search on Google sometimes produces a well-known glitch if the domain was already crawled (archived here).
Another tab that specifically addressed the history of the image and not the page - "Google's 'About this image' tab." (archived here) -- classified the photo as recent, meaning that it was less than one month old on March 17, 2026:
(Image source: Google.)
