Video shows Chinese firefighting exercise, not Iranian strike on Israeli power station

Published on June 23, 2025 at 11:35
4 min read
By Akshita KUMARI, AFP India

After Tehran responded to waves of strikes from arch foe Israel with missiles and drones, a video was shared in social media posts falsely claiming it showed an Iranian attack destroying an Israeli power plant. The clip in fact shows a firefighting drill conducted in the Chinese city of Chengdu in November 2015 and matches satellite imagery of a training base in the southwestern metropolis.

"Iran claims that its hypersonic missile directly hit the power plant in the Israeli city of Haifa, destroying the entire power plant," reads the caption of a Facebook video shared on June 18, 2025.

The video appears to show fires that trigger several explosions at a power plant.

It surfaced after Iran said it fired hypersonic missiles -- which travel at more than five times the speed of sound and can manoeuvre mid-flight, making them harder to track and intercept -- at Israel in the latest round of overnight strikes between the arch foes (archived link).

An oil refinery in Haifa had also previously been struck by an Iranian missile on June 15 (archived link).

Despite international alarm about the conflict potentially spiralling into a region-engulfing war, neither side has backed off from the long-range blitz that began on June 13 when Israel launched an unprecedented bombing campaign targeting Iranian nuclear and military facilities.

The United States joined Israel's war with Tehran on June 22, with President Donald Trump announcing that US air strikes had "totally obliterated" Iran's main nuclear sites and warning Washington would go after more targets if Iran did not make a peace deal quickly (archived link).

Screenshot of the false Facebook post captured on June 20, 2025, with a red X added by AFP

The same footage spread in similar Facebook, Threads and X posts.

But the video does not show an Iranian attack on a power plant in Haifa.

AFP also previously debunked posts that misrepresented the same clip in May 2019 as showing a fire in Singapore.

'Rescue drill'

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video led to a longer version published November 17, 2015 on YouTube (archived link).

The title reads: "Massive explosion at Chinese chemical plant".

Another reverse image search on Chinese search engine Baidu led to a report published by People's Daily Online in 2016 that said the footage in fact showed a fire drill held at the Chengdu Public Security Fire Brigade Training Base in November 2015 (archived here and here). It added that the official Weibo account of the Sichuan Fire Services had shared details of the drill (archived link).

The simplified Chinese Weibo post reads: "A rescue drill display was held at the Chengdu Public Security Fire Brigade Training Base on the afternoon of November 12 for the eighth meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation's emergency rescue department."

Structures seen in one of the photos in the Weibo post correspond to those seen in the video.

Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video with a red X added by AFP (L) and the photo shared on Weibo

Elements from the falsely shared clip also correspond to January 2016 satellite imagery of the training base available on Google Earth (archived link).

Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (L) and satellite imagery on Google Earth, with matching features highlighted by AFP

The Sichuan fire brigade published more photos from the drill in a separate article on the same day (archived link).

AFP has debunked several other false claims related to the Iran-Israel conflict.

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