Benjamin Netanyahu has fought his campaigns with speeches, billboards and the occasional cartoon bomb at the UN. On Thursday he reached for a game controller.
"Eisenkot and Lieberman will establish a Palestinian state before GTA 6 comes out," the prime minister wrote on X, above an AI-generated clip built to look like the Grand Theft Auto games.
The plot, as described by the Israeli site Ice, plays like a mission briefing. A digital Gadi Eisenkot strolls through Tel Aviv when his phone buzzes with a message from a blocked number. "If you want to be prime minister, start stealing votes from the right," it reads, according to Channel 14. He picks up a sack labeled "right-wing votes" and sets off on a joyride with Avigdor Liberman that somehow includes swimming with dolphins and skydiving off a tower. The mission ends in a luxury penthouse, where Eisenkot hands the sack to Ra'am chairman Mansour Abbas. Then comes the game's famous "WASTED" screen, followed by two game-cover posters: Netanyahu under the word "Right," and his opponents on the other.
For anyone who has not spent years waiting for it, GTA 6 is gaming's longest-running promise, delayed so often that "before GTA 6" became internet shorthand for "any day now." It is finally due on November 19. Israel votes on October 27. By Netanyahu's math, his rivals would need about three weeks.
The joke carries the message Likud has pushed all campaign: an Eisenkot government would lean on Arab parties and Yair Golan's Democrats, and that road ends in a Palestinian state.
Eisenkot, for the record, says otherwise. The Yashar chairman wrote on X in August that "under a government we form, no Palestinian state will be established," Jewish News reported.
