Old video, image from Lebanon falsely linked to Middle East war

"Israel and US attacked Iran, pity the civilians," says overlaid Tagalog-language text on a Facebook video shared on February 28, 2026.

The video, which was viewed more than 230,000 times, shows a crowd watching as a building is destroyed by what appears to be a missile strike.

A separate Facebook post from March 1 also shares what it claims is an image of US-Israeli strikes on Iran, overlaying the picture with Tagalog-language text that says: "Donald Trump bombed Iran. Is this the start of World War III?"

"Conflict between Iran-US-Israel. The US-Israel attack is a matter of national security and international law," reads part of the lengthy Tagalog-language post.

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Screenshots of the false posts captured on March 7, 2026, with red Xs added by AFP

The video and image were also shared elsewhere on Facebook after a massive joint United States and Israel attack on Iran, which killed the Islamic republic's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (archived link).

Iran responded with a flurry of missile and drone strikes across the Middle East before following up with a new wave after state media confirmed Khamenei's death.

US Central Command, responsible for US forces in the Middle East, said over 3,000 Iranian targets have been struck since the war began, including Revolutionary Guard headquarters, command-and-control centres, air defence systems, missile sites, navy warships and submarines.

The video and image circulating on social media, however, do not show any US-Israeli strikes on Iran. They were both captured in Lebanon's capital Beirut, in 2024 and 2020.

Israeli strike on south Beirut

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video found the footage had previously been published on AFP's YouTube channel on November 22, 2024 (archived link).

The falsely shared video appears to be a cropped version of the AFP clip.

Its description says it shows "the moment an Israeli strike hits a building in Beirut's southern suburbs following an Israeli army evacuation call".

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Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (L) and the AFP YouTube video from November 2024

Cross-border fire between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah over the Gaza conflict escalated into full-scale war in September 2024, with Israel conducting an intensive bombing campaign, primarily targeting Hezbollah strongholds and sending ground troops into southern Lebanon (archived link).

Lebanon has also been dragged into the widening conflict between the United States and Israel and Iran, when Hezbollah attacked Israel to avenge the killing of Khamenei (archived link).

Israel responded with air strikes and sent ground troops into some Lebanese border villages, and targeted Beirut's southern suburbs, saying it was "striking Hezbollah infrastructure".

Beirut port explosion

The falsely shared image has previously been mispresented as showing a US strike on Iran, but reverse image searches show it has circulated since August 2020 when one of the world's biggest non-nuclear explosions destroyed much of Beirut's port and devastated swathes of the capital (archived link).

It was caused by a fire in a warehouse that authorities acknowledged had held a vast stockpile of ammonium nitrate. 

The blast, which killed more than 220 people and injured at least 6,500 others, struck as Lebanon was mired in its worst economic crisis in decades, marked by an unprecedented depreciation of its currency, massive layoffs and drastic banking restrictions (archived link).

The falsely shared image appears to have been taken from the video of the explosion, which was posted by Saudi state-owned broadcaster Al-Arabiya on X on August 5, 2020 (archived link).

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Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared image (L) and the clip posted by Al-Arabiya

The footage also matches Google Maps imagery of the port area (archived link).

AFP has previously debunked other false claims stemming from the war in Iran.