Video shows sandstorm in Saudi Arabia, not Israel

Published on May 19, 2025 at 10:51
3 min read
By AFP Indonesia

Desert storms blanketed parts of Israel in late April but purported footage of the phenomenon that spread globally online is unrelated. The clip is from Saudi Arabia, taken a month earlier.

"Israel Hit by Massive Desert Storm Amid The Nation's Fire Emergency," says the Indonesian-language caption to the video filmed from inside a vehicle and showing a giant wall of dust.

It has racked up more than 83,000 views since being posted on Instagram on May 2, 2025.

The post added that the clip was filmed in Israel's southern Negev desert.

Screenshot of false post, taken on May 7, 2025

The video was also misrepresented on X, Facebook, Threads and TikTok and appeared in other posts written in English, Spanish and French.

Powerful sandstorms swept through the Negev April 30 as parts of Israel were also battling wildfires driven by strong winds, Anadolu Agency reported (archived link).

Bushfires near Jerusalem prompted widespread evacuations and road closures but were largely brought under control early May, authorities said (archived link).

However, the video circulating across various social media platforms was not shot in Israel.

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes found it posted on Facebook on March 21, 2025, along with a caption that says the footage was taken in Saudi Arabia (archived link).

Screenshot comparison of the false post (L) and the clip from March 2025

Turkey-based fact-checking organisation Teyit previously debunked the misrepresented clip and found a structure seen at the end corresponds to a 2023 photo of a mosque in Saudi Arabia's Wadi ad-Dawasir city (archived here and here).

Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (L) and geotagged photo from Google Maps (R) with corresponding features highlighted by AFP

A further search on Google Earth found aerial view of the mosque also corresponds to one shown in the video (archived link).

Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (L) and aerial image from Google Earth (R) with corresponding features highlighted by AFP

The spokesperson for Saudi Arabia's National Center of Meteorology, Hussein Al-Qahtani, had also issued a statement in late March on his official X account that a dust storm had hit Wadi ad-Dawasir (archived link).

AFP Fact Check has previously debunked several claims with misrepresented videos regarding Israel here and here.

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