What’s wrong with Benjamin Netanyahu?

That was the question Israelis asked on Sunday after the Prime Minister’s Office announced he would be absent from the weekly cabinet meeting “for personal reasons”.

Netanyahu, however, showed up at the session — 10 minutes late, enough time for the vague wording of the announcement to touch off a flurry of speculation on Israeli radio talk shows over the state of the 59-year-old leader’s health.

Radio hosts asked: Had he contracted swine flu? After all, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper had reported earlier that Netanyahu might have been exposed to the virus after the driver of a close associate was diagnosed with the ailment.

But Netanyahu’s bureau, issuing a second announcement, offered another explanation.

“The prime minister awoke this morning with a foreign object in his eye — a small piece of grit,” it said in a beeper message to reporters.

“He drove to the medical clinic where an eye doctor extracted the grit and released him so that he could chair the cabinet meeting and go about his normal workday.”

(PHOTO: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives for a non-confidence vote at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem June 15, 2009. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)