Iran's attack on Israel: these false, misleading images spreading on social networks

Frequent in times of war, the phenomenon of disinformation does not spare the extreme tensions between Iran and Israel. Since the attack launched by Tehran towards the Jewish state on the night of Saturday April 13 to Sunday April 14, in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of an Iranian consulate in Damascus in Syria on April 1, numerous hijacked images and videos have gone viral on social networks. They claim to show scenes of destruction and panic in Israel, while the vast majority of drones and missiles launched by the Revolutionary Guards were intercepted by the IDF - or almost all of them, Israelis and Americans claim -, causing conflicts. limited damage.

A video broadcast by an Iranian state television channel, revealing a forest fire, indicates that it started following Iran's attack on Israel. It actually shows images of violent fires which ravaged Chile last February, said Sunday on X Shayan Sardarizadeh, a BBC journalist specializing in disinformation.

Another video, widely shared on social networks, “falsely claims to show an Israeli settlement hit by Iranian missiles,” the journalist revealed. However, it “goes back to the war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021 and shows a Hamas rocket destroying a house in Rishon LeZion,” he continued.

A sequence posted on Sunday by American influencer Jackson Hinkle, claiming to show "Israelis in complete panic" during the Iranian attack, in fact shows "fans of Louis Tomlinson near the Four Seasons hotel in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, last week,” the editor further indicated.

Palestinians from the Al-Aqsa Mosque, located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, appear in a video viewed thousands of times. The latter insinuates that they are celebrating the Iranian strikes, while it “dates from last week and shows Palestinians praying at Al-Aqsa on the last Friday of Ramadan,” revealed Sardarizadeh.

The Israeli army also allegedly shared false images. A video, published on Sunday on the IDF's X account, is cut into several small video sequences. Among them, a false segment was taken from a video describing a Russian Grad rocket attack on Ukraine in 2014, explains the Israeli site Ynet. “This attack shows Iran’s true colors,” the excerpt reads.