A raft of unauthentic videos allegedly showing the latest escalation between Israel and Iran are circulating online.
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As Israel and Iran exchange fire for the fourth consecutive day, unverified footage of missile and drone attacks targeted at both countries is spreading virally online.
Euronews’ fact-checking and verification team, Euroverify, has been taking a closer look at some of those videos in order to verify their authenticity and corroborate the location of strikes.
Verifying such footage is crucial in this conflict. It allows us to debunk false reports and ensure the footage used in our reporting is authentic.
Debunking false, AI-generated footage
Videos generated using artificial intelligence and falsely claiming to show Israeli and Iranian strikes are spreading virally online.
This video, which has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, claims to show destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes on Iran.
But our analysis shows that the video has been clearly generated using AI. A closer look reveals that artificial-looking rays are emanating from one of the cooling towers. A fire truck can also be seen on the precipice of a crater while some of the emergency workers seem to disappear into thin air.
Other AI-generated videos spreading virally claim to show damage caused to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport by an Iranian strike.
Euroverify detected several versions of the videos circulating on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X.
But the video is clearly the work of AI, and is being shared widely by known disinformation accounts.
While Iran’s semi-official state media Mehr has reported that Iranian strikes struck Ben Gurion airport in Israel’s largest city on Sunday, those reports have not been verified.
Unrelated footage falsely linked to strikes
We also detected online users falsely linking old videos of unrelated events to the current strikes.
A video showing what appears to be a residential building engulfed in flames was shared by Al Jazeera’s Arabic profile on X, with the caption: “Massive fires in Tel Aviv sites as a result of the Iranian missile attack.”
But a reverse image search shows that the same video was first circulating online in early May, meaning it cannot show damage caused by the current exchange of fire.
A Facebook user shared the video on 10 May, claiming it shows the impact of an airstrike of fire between India and Pakistan.
A brief but intense exchange of fire between those two countries took place from 7 to 10 May, but we were unable to verify whether the video in question shows damage resulting from those attacks.
Another widely shared image claims to show an explosion at an Iranian oil refinery caused by an Israeli strike.
We used a reverse image search to find that the picture in fact comes from a video showing a November 2020 explosion at a petrochemical plant in Ilam, Iran.
The explosion was widely covered by Iranian media, and has no link to the ongoing conflict between Tehran and Tel Aviv.
Israeli strikes have nonetheless struck key energy infrastructure including the South Pars gas field in southern Iran and the Shahran oil depot in Tehran.