Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Iran had tried to kill one of his sons. "This is an unbelievable case. Iran targeted one of my sons. Iran tried to murder him," he said, according to Al Jazeera. He was speaking by phone to Channel 14, a conservative Israeli outlet.

He did not say which of his two sons, when the alleged plot took place, or where. No evidence was offered.

What we can and cannot report

We can report that the prime minister said this. We cannot report that it happened, and neither, on this account, can anyone else: there is no confirmation from any Israeli security service in the source, and no detail against which the claim could be checked.

That is not a suggestion that it is untrue. Governments routinely decline to discuss thwarted plots, and a real one might be described exactly this vaguely. It is a statement about what a reader is in a position to know this morning, which is one sentence spoken in an interview.

The context he said it in

Netanyahu made the remark while arguing that Gadi Eisenkot should be given security protection, adding: "Without that, [the Iranians] will succeed." The bracketed word is the source's clarification.

His sons and his wife were given extended personal protection by the Israeli authorities in July.

Why the threat environment is not in doubt

The claim arrives after a US and Israeli military campaign against Iran in which Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and four members of his family were killed. Iran has promised revenge, and Khamenei's successor, his son Mojtaba, has pledged to "avenge the blood" of the former leader.

So the general proposition, that senior Israelis are targets, requires no persuading. What remains unestablished is this specific incident.

The election

Netanyahu's coalition is trailing in opinion polls ahead of elections in October.

We note that because readers weighing an unverifiable security claim from a politician are entitled to know when it is made. It is not evidence that the claim is false, and we are not presenting it as such.

What we could not establish

We could not establish which son was allegedly targeted, when or where, what the plot is said to have involved, whether Israeli security services have confirmed anything, or whether Iran has responded to this specific allegation. We verified this account from a single publication.