Fact-Check: These Visuals Are Old , Unrelated To Israel's Recent Attack on Iran

Both visuals are old and are unrelated to the recent conflict between Israel and Iran.

Neither of these visuals have any connection to Israel's recent attack on Tehran.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

Social media users are sharing visuals of explosions and fighter jets, linking them to the recent armed conflict between Israel and Iran.

The claims: Sharing a video of fighter jets flying by in formations, some users claimed that the video showed "Israel fighter jet squadrons returning after bombing Iran."

An archive of this post can be seen here.

(Source: X (formerly Twitter)/Screenshot)

Other users shared a photo of an explosion in the dark, claiming that it showed a recent photo of blasts near Iran's Tehran.

An archived version of this post can be seen here.

(Source: X/Screenshot)

(Archived versions of more posts sharing these claims can be seen here, here, here, and here.)

Is it true?: No, both visuals are old and no related to Israel's attack on Iran, which happened on 26 October 2024.

• The first video reportedly shows an air drill by Egypt's military forces around 3 October 2024.

• The second photo dates back to June 2021 and shows an explosion at an oil refinery near Tehran.

How did we find out the truth?: We ran reverse image searches on both visuals to find more information.

Video: Fighter Jets

For the video, we used InVID, a video verification tool on Google Chrome, and divided it into keyframes.

• Running a reverse image search on one of the frames led us to a longer, clearer version of the video.

• We repeated the steps to conduct a search on this clip, which resulted in us finding an X post, shared on 7 October 2024, nearly three weeks before Israel launched an attack against Iran.

• It was shared with a Turkish caption, which loosely translates to "Egyptian army conducts drills... There is a population of 110 million. The biggest power in the Middle East after Turkey.. Border to Gaza. It's not even good for himself. (sic)"

• A relevant keyword search using the term 'Egypt air drills' in Arabic (مصر مناورات جوية) returned results with news reports about drills by Egypt's air force.

• One such report was shared by Egyptian news channel CBC Egypt on their verified YouTube channel, whose description mentioned that it showed an air show with 19 Krupp aircrafts, flown by students of the country's military and military-equivalent colleges.

Photo: Explosion

A reverse image search on this photo on TinEye resulted in a report by Canadian news website The Globe and Mail, which carried the same photo in its report about a fire at an oil refinery near Tehran.

• The report, which was published on 2 June 2021, credited the photograph to news agency AFP.

The photo dates back to 2021.

(Source: The Globe and Mail/Altered by The Quint)

On the agency's 'Picture' website, we looked up 'Tehran oil refinery'.

This search showed us the same photograph, which was shared on 2 June 2021, mentioned that it showed a "fierce blaze" at a refinery in southern Tehran, which broke out after a gas line leaked.

The photo shows a blaze at a refinery in Tehran.

(Source: AFP/Altered by The Quint)

Conclusions: Both visuals predate the recent conflict between Iran and Israel, making the claims false.

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