In recent days, we have seen a surge in misinformation about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East on social media.
We identified at least 12 videos with incorrect captions and 7 AI-generated or enhanced images with thousands of interactions between them, and fact-checked the 10 most viral posts, as listed below. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, with dozens more warnings from fact checkers and verification experts around the world.
In the wake of global news events, it has become increasingly common to see AI-generated content being shared as if it were real. Even images that appear to be AI but are not very convincing, such as images with visible watermarks (like these photos purporting to capture US special forces), are being shared on a large scale. And the sheer volume of this fake content and the ease with which it is generated is concerning.
In recent days, we’ve seen fake images of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei buried in rubble, as well as AI images purporting to show Burj Khalifa and the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on fire.
But often, the misinformation we see doesn’t rely on new technology, but on repurposed images with incorrect captions.
A widely shared post we saw earlier this week shared a photo of Interior Minister Shabana Mahmoud at a mosque in Southport in 2024, along with a claim that he had observed a minute’s silence for Khamenei in Birmingham. she didn’t.
Some of the videos we saw were fact-checked previously during other conflicts.
For example, a striking video showing an explosion near a building purported to be in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv actually showed a warehouse fire in China in 2015. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen that particular clip shared with false claims that it shows Tel Aviv. The same thing happened after Iran’s missile attack on Israel in October 2024. And even before that, we saw this clip incorrectly captioned and shared after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Old footage of a soccer celebration in Algiers that we previously fact-checked in connection with Gaza was also recirculated with false claims that it showed Iran’s attack on Tel Aviv. And I’ve even seen a video with an erroneous caption that appears to show a US military base in the Gulf under attack, but its origins date back to the start of the Iraq War in 2003. This video has gone viral before with an incorrect caption.
Other clips are much more recent, but still unrelated to recent conflicts. Video of a giant fireball, with claims to show the US embassy in Saudi Arabia being attacked, had been online since at least February 6 of this year, before the latest attack began. Another video has been shared that claims to show an Israeli plane targeting Ben Gurion Airport just before takeoff, but actually shows an incident that took place in the US last year.
In recent days, we have also seen a lot of misinformation related to the attacks on Dubai. For example, footage of an apartment fire in a nearby city in 2015 and an old video from 2024 were shared with false claims to show a missile attack on the UAE.
Another video was posted that falsely claimed that a US air base in Saudi Arabia was “reduced to ashes” after an Iranian missile attack. Features visible in the video, such as the unique roof with the word “UNICEF” written on it, a panel on the roof of a neighboring building, and a patch of green, were used to match it to a satellite image of a Yemeni port road taken in 2024.
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How to check the facts of online claims yourself
As we always say, while global events are unfolding, it is essential to consider whether the information you are seeing online is accurate to avoid sharing misleading information.
If you suspect an image or video online, but aren’t sure if it’s misleading, one of your best options is to perform a reverse image search to see if the image or video has never been published online before.
If you use Google’s reverse image search feature, you can click “About this image” to see if your image is flagged as “Created with Google AI.” If so, it means the image contains an embedded SynthID watermark, which is invisible to the human eye but can be used to identify content that was created, or at least modified, by Google’s AI tools. (However, the absence of SynthID does not prove that the photo was not created by AI.)
Some AI tools may leave visible watermarks, such as the Sora (OpenAI’s text-to-video generator that created ChatGPT), Gemini, or Grok logos. This can provide strong evidence that even the most convincing content is not genuine.
However, it’s worth remembering that these watermarks can be easily cropped before sharing images, and you can even generate content without them.
Our guide has lots of other tips on how to spot misleading images and videos. We also created a toolkit to help identify misinformation and wrote about how to identify images, videos, and audio generated by AI.
10 viral posts about the Middle East conflict that have been fact-checked so far
- Video of explosion near building not an attack on Tel Aviv but actually shows an incident in China in 2015
- Fake images of Burj Khalifa on fire created or modified using AI
- False claim that the Minister of Interior took part in a minute’s silence for Ayatollah Hamanei
- Fake image of Hamanei buried in rubble created and modified using AI
- Old footage of fire after Israeli airstrike in Yemen shared with false claim to show US air base in Saudi Arabia
- A shared video purports to show people being evacuated from an Israeli military plane at Ben Gurion Airport, but was actually filmed in the US last year.
- AI-generated image purportedly showing aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on fire
- Video of a big fireball. Predates the current conflict, but was shared claiming it shows an attack on the US embassy in Saudi Arabia
- A video of a missile attack dating back to at least 2024 has been shared and is claimed to show an Iranian missile attack on Dubai.
- Footage of 2015 apartment fire shared as showing Iranian attack on Dubai
