Netanyahu warns of election-eve attacks; Lapid says the briefing lasted nine minutes
A classified intelligence briefing has become a public argument about what was in it, with both principals on the record and the flydubai incident pressed into service as proof.
On Tuesday 29 September, in a video filmed at Tel Nof air base, Netanyahu said: “We have indications that, ahead of the elections, our enemies will try to attack us.” Yair Lapid demanded an urgent briefing, writing on X that he wanted “to understand if the threats are real, and if so, how the prime minister is preparing to ensure the election will take place without disruptions.” The Prime Minister’s Office first refused, then offered the military secretary, then agreed to a face-to-face at 11:30 p.m. Afterwards the PMO said “warnings of possible attacks on various fronts in the run-up to the elections were presented in detail,” with military secretary Maj. Gen. Guy Markizeno and the Military Secretariat’s intelligence officer attending. Likud’s rebuttal statement says Lapid left at 11:39 p.m. and published his criticism “just two minutes later, at record speed” — a nine-minute briefing, by Likud’s own arithmetic.
Lapid’s line, carried by AFP and Al Jazeera: “The elections will take place on time, and no one has an excuse to disrupt them”; “there is no reason to panic the public”; “Netanyahu ignored every warning before October 7, and now, 28 days before the election, he’s suddenly busy fear-mongering.” He accused the prime minister of using military bases as “props for election campaign videos.” The following morning, when government allies presented the flydubai hijacking attempt as vindication, Lapid said nothing resembling it had been raised in the briefing, and accused an unnamed “diplomatic source” — whom the Times of Israel says he strongly implies is Netanyahu — of lying to Hebrew media about what he was told. At an 11:28 p.m. Tel Aviv press conference the same night, Naftali Bennett said Netanyahu “himself leads the worst danger of all — mass draft evasion and the collapse of the IDF.”
Assessment: Both men are arguing from a document neither will publish, which is the structural advantage of incumbency: the prime minister can gesture at classified warnings and the challenger can only call them thin. Note that Lapid and Bennett pivoted the same day from the threat warning to Haredi conscription — a shared frame, with no evidence of coordination. The background is arithmetic. The Middle East Forum poll-of-polls had the Netanyahu bloc at 53 and the opposition at 55, with 12 Arab-party seats; the same average showed Likud ranging from 18 to 31 seats across 14 polls in 14 days. With house effects that wide, a security frame is the cheapest available instrument.