Netanyahu poster is from 2014 and was not recently published in a French newspaper

What's the claim?

On May 2, 2024, a political cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a red suit with a devil's tail drinking the blood out of Gaza was published on Facebook. The cartoon includes a superscript which states, "This caricature photo was published by the French newspaper La Presse and then it was pulled down after the pressure of the Zionist lobby. Please help to spread it widely." 

The poster captioned the photo: "The hypocrisy of the West." The caption continues: "When Charlie Hebdo printed caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, the French criticized the Muslim World for being upset about them and said it was freedom of speech. Yet when a French magazine drew this caricature of the war criminal, they were asked to remove it under pressure from the ZIO lobby." 

The caption refers to the January 7, 2015, terrorist attack in Paris on the office of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, during which gunmen linked to Al-Qaeda killed 12 people. This was in response to a political cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed published by the newspaper. The attack sparked widespread debates on freedom of expression. 

The claim is also circulating on X (formerly known as Twitter).

The image of Netanyahu was published by a genuine media outlet as a satirical cartoon. But it wasn't published by a French newspaper, and it's from 2014.

What we found

A reverse image search reveals the cartoon has been circulating online since 2014. The image has been republished under the caption "Vampire Netanyahu" in an internet archive of Palestine liberation posters. The archive states that it was published in 2014 by Iranian news outlet Tasnim News and implies it was created in response to the 2014 Gazan conflict from July 8 to August 26, during which 2,251 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces. Netanyahu was serving as prime minister for the second time during this conflict. 

We could not find the original image on Tasnim News' website, as their online political cartoon archive only includes content from 2017 onwards. However, a Tasnim News logo is visible in the upper corner of the image (although this seems to have been cropped out of the version posted on Facebook). They have also published political cartoons depicting other world leaders, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, with similar devil imagery. 

On March 20, 2024 a Canadian newspaper made headlines after it published a political cartoon depicting Netanyahu a vampire from the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu. La Presse, a French-language digital paper based in Montreal, pulled the cartoon after it was widely criticized for being antisemitic. 

However, the cartoon published by La Presse is visibly different from the one depicted in the Facebook and X posts.

The verdict

A political cartoon depicting Netanyahu as a vampire is recirculating online with claims that it was recently published and subsequently taken down by a Western news outlet. However, the political cartoon was published by an Iranian news outlet in 2014. A Canadian French-language news outlet recently published and then retracted a different political cartoon of Netanyahu that was deemed antisemitic. We have therefore rated this as misleading.