Post falsely links old unrelated photos to Iran's missile attack on Israel
Iran launched its first-ever direct attack on its arch-foe Israel on April 13, 2024, sharply increasing tensions in a region already on edge after six months of war in Gaza. A Facebook post shared in Ethiopia after the assault claimed to show photos of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel. But AFP Fact Check found this to be false: the photos are from the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2022 and military exercises in the Gulf of Oman in 2021.
“It has been confirmed that Iran is attacking Israel with 12 missiles,” starts the post in Afaan Oromoo published on April 14, 2024.
“The blood of the Palestinians has not flowed in vain. Iran has taken revenge. America and the Western countries that have supported Israel have now started to scream,” it continues.
The post, shared more than 150 times, contains photos of two airborne weapons.
It attracted more than 160 comments, many fiercely debating the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza from a religious point of view.
Religious tensions have also been on the rise in Ethiopia, which is home to one of the world’s oldest churches and has the third-largest Muslim population in sub-Saharan Africa (archived here).
Iran’s attack
Late on April 13, 2024, Iran launched an unprecedented direct attack on Israel in retaliation for a deadly air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1 (archived here).
Iran’s assault – carried out with more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles – has heightened tensions in the conflict-prone Middle East region, as Israel has threatened military retaliation.
US President Joe Biden vowed to prevent the Middle East conflict from escalating but said he would continue to support Israel in its defence (archived here).
However, the photos do not show the recent Iranian attack on Israel.
Unrelated photos
AFP Fact Check conducted reverse image searches and found that the photos stem from the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022 and a military exercise in the Gulf of Oman in 2021.
Results for the first photo (archived here) reveal that it was captured by AFP photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba on October 17, 2022 and shows an armed drone approaching Kyiv amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The second photo appeared in a 2021 December article by US magazine Newsweek about tensions between world leaders and Iran over a failed nuclear deal (archived here). According to the caption, it shows an Iranian surface-to-air missile system fired during a military exercise in November 2021.
Newsweek magazine credited Iran’s army as the source of the picture.
The Tehran Times also published (archived here) the image in a November 7, 2021 report on the massive military exercise conducted by the Iranian army in the southern coastal areas of Iran and maritime zones in Oman.
AFP Fact Check has debunked similar misleading claims using unrelated videos and photos to falsely link them to Iran’s attack on Israel, including here.
