Gadi Eisenkot's party seeks removal of AI-made Smotrich campaign video

The Yesh! party, led by Gadi Eisenkot, filed an urgent petition on Friday to Central Elections Committee chairman Noam Solberg, asking him to order Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and the Religious Zionism party to immediately remove a campaign video built from fake artificial intelligence images. The petition says the material creates a false impression that Eisenkot had connections that never existed.

Filed through attorney Uri Haberman, the petition asks the committee to set a clear boundary for election campaigning. “An election campaign cannot become a arena where lies, manipulation and fake AI content replace facts,” the party said. “Democracy rests on political debate, not on inventing reality.”

The petition also attacks Smotrich personally, calling him “the finance minister and minister in the Defense Ministry who failed in every field and was a central part of the October 7 cabinet,” and accusing him of “fabricating reality and misleading the public.” It added that instead of dealing with reality and his failures, he is spreading propaganda based on “obvious lies” made from artificial images.

Smotrich responded that the petition was “a ridiculous attempt to silence.” He said Eisenkot was alarmed by a video that, in his words, reveals the truth about “the left-wing government he is going to form with Mansour Abbas and Yair Golan.” Smotrich said such a government would evacuate settlements and farms, dismantle the security buffer built in Judea and Samaria, and close the Alei yeshiva preparatory academy. He urged Eisenkot to commit not to form a government with Abbas and not to roll back Israel’s moves in Judea and Samaria, saying the right-wing public must understand the danger it faces.