Shin Bet confirms spiriting Yair Netanyahu back from Miami due to ‘significant threat’

The Shin Bet security agency confirmed on Saturday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Yair, was returned to Israel from Miami after a threat to his life.

The agency’s comments came after a report earlier this week that the younger Netanyahu was the target of an Iranian assassination plot in December 2025, while he was living in Florida. The reports surfaced after Netanyahu told the pro-government Channel 14 in a phone interview that “Iran targeted one of my sons. Iran tried to kill, to murder one of my sons.”

In a statement carried on Saturday evening, the Shin Bet confirmed that “there was a significant threat to harm Yair Netanyahu, and in light of this and after an assessment, a decision was made to urgently extract him along with his security team and return him to Israel.”

In order to carry out the snap operation, Channel 12 reported that the Shin Bet moved some of its agents to Miami from New York, where they were attached to President Isaac Herzog, who was visiting at the time.

The younger Netanyahu is thought to have been living in Israel for much of the time since.

The Hebrew-language report did not specify the nature of the threat, nor who was behind it. On Wednesday, however, US outlet Newsmax reported that intelligence agencies believed Iranian agents were “on the ground” in the Miami area conducting surveillance on Yair’s movements.

Yair Netanyahu had spent much of the previous several years living in the Miami area, where his reportedly luxurious lifestyle and the state-funded security provided to him repeatedly drew public attention in Israel.

His extended stay abroad drew criticism after the outbreak of the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, with critics questioning why the prime minister’s son remained overseas while hundreds of thousands of Israelis were serving in the military reserves.

Netanyahu defended the security provided to his sons in his Channel 14 interview, saying that without it, would-be assassins “would succeed.”

Yair Netanyahu has long maintained a prominent and often combative presence on social media, where he has frequently weighed in on Israeli politics and attacked his father’s political opponents, government critics and members of the media.

The firebrand right-wing activist and podcaster has also been associated with far-right European and American politicians and public figures.

In April 2023, Israeli media reported that Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu had asked their son to stop posting on social media and communicating directly with ministers and lawmakers amid accusations that he was inflaming political tensions.

Later that year, Yair liked a social media post accusing then-IDF chief Herzi Halevi of carrying out a “military coup” on October 7 by allegedly withholding advance knowledge of Hamas’s attack from the prime minister.