Clip shows China blast, not Iranian strike on Israel

"Massive explosions continue to rock Tel-Aviv as Iranian missiles hit ammunition Depot. Iran never wanted this war. It was imposed on us just like the Iraq war," says a June 14, 2025 Facebook post.

The post, viewed tens of thousands of times, shows a huge, fiery explosion over a city at night.

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Screenshot of a video on Facebook taken June 24, 2025

Similar posts spread across X in several languages as the countries exchanged deadly rocket fire in June 2025.

The war between the two arch enemies began June 13 when Israel launched a major bombing campaign targeting Iranian nuclear facilities and senior military figures, to which Iran responded with waves of missile attacks.

The United States joined the conflict June 22, launching strikes on Iran's Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz nuclear sites. US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire that took effect June 24 after Tehran fired ballistic missiles at a US base in Qatar.

But the explosion video is unrelated -- and was previously misrepresented in 2022 when social media users falsely linked it to the war in Ukraine.

A Google reverse image search surfaced the same video in various news reports from August 2015 covering dramatic explosions that ripped through an industrial part of the Chinese city of Tianjin.

The incident, which devastated the city's port and surrounding residential areas, left at least 135 dead and more than 580 injured.

US citizen Dan Van Duren, an eyewitness and survivor of the blasts, reportedly recorded the footage.

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Screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (L) and the eyewitness footage provided to the BBC

A separate video that AFP obtained at the time from the Chinese state media outlet CCTV shows a similar scene.

AFP has previously fact-checked posts that mischaracterized other videos of the Tianjin explosion as unrelated events.

More debunked claims about the Iran-Israel conflict can be found here.