If Israel’s footage is meant to settle questions, why has it left so many people asking where Netanyahu and Ben Gvir actually are? Right, so this is perhaps not the face you were expecting at the start of this video, but I daresay you were expecting to see something along these lines if you’re already somewhat familiar with this story because this is a clip of the Netanyahu speech Israel has put out, the full version is 8 minutes long, if you really want to watch the whole thing the one meant to show the man alive, present, speaking, governing, all the usual serious-leader stuff after he’s not been seen for days, dark suit, stern face, little hand gestures, the full package. It’s what we expect from a Netanyahu televised announcement, just missing the whinging and the accusations of antisemitism that generally come with it, the sound having been muted. The trouble is, they have managed to release a what amounts to a reassurance video that has left people watching his hands and counting his fingers. Or watching his teeth seemingly come into frame and then disappear as if by magic. Tremendous work. Watch the hands as they come up in front of his chest. Watch the shape of them. Watch the way the fingers seem to sit and then not sit, the way the image starts looking smeared and wrong, the way one part of the hand area starts drawing the eye because it does not look clean or natural enough to just pass over. That is why people have been slowing this down. That is why people have been pulling stills from it. That is why what was supposed to be proof has started getting treated like a possible fake and to say that is feeding suspicion right now would be an understatement. The clip was supposed to settle people down. Benjamin Netanyahu was put in front of cameras on 12 March and instead of calming anything down it sent people into frame-by-frame mode because a lot of them looked at one section of that footage and did not see reassurance, they saw something off. They saw hands that looked wrong, movement that looked wrong, delivery that some thought looked wrong, teeth that looked wrong and within hours the whole thing had gone from “here is the prime minister speaking” to “what exactly have they put out here?” That is how badly this has landed. A wartime government tried to project continuity and have got the internet counting fingers.