Old video of California chemical fire falsely linked to missile strikes on Israel
- Published on March 10, 2026 at 04:03
- 2 min read
- By AFP Middle East & North Africa
- Translation and adaptation AFP Malaysia
Iran has barraged Israeli cities with missiles after joint US-Israeli strikes on the Islamic republic on February 28, 2026, but footage of an explosion circulating online does not show an attack on Tel Aviv. The video in fact depicts a chemical fire that gutted two industrial buildings in California in 2016.
"Unexploded Iranian missile found in Tel Aviv detonated when it was approached!" reads Malay-language text over a March 8 TikTok video of a massive explosion.
Screenshots from the same video circulated alongside similar Malay-language posts on Facebook, which further claimed firefighters attempting to control the fire were taken by surprise by the explosion.
The footage also spread in English, Arabic, and Indonesian posts that surfaced after the United States and Israel launched a massive attack on Iran on February 28, 2026 that killed its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (archived link).
Both Iran and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group have targeted Tel Aviv in a series of retaliatory strikes, while Israel has also continued to bombard both countries.
The war has also spread to other countries, with Iran lashing out at other nations seen as US or Israeli allies (archived here and here).
But the circulating clip is unrelated to the war and was first shared online nearly a decade earlier.
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared clip found footage showing the same explosions published by the American broadcaster ABC7 News on June 14, 2016 on its official Facebook page (archived link).
The post says the fire was in Maywood, a city in Los Angeles county, California.
Further keyword searches led to the same footage on YouTube, shared on June 17, 2016, titled "Maywood, CA Magnesium Explosion" (archived link).
According to a Los Angeles Daily News report published on June 15, 2016, the chemical fire that broke out at a metals-recycling plant took two days to extinguish and forced 300 residents from their homes (archived link).
The explosions were caused by oxygen from water being used to put out the flames creating a chemical reaction with the burning metals, the report said.
The warehouses seen in the foreground of the explosion can be seen in Google Street View imagery of Fruitland Avenue in Maywood (archived link).
AFP has debunked a wave of misinformation related to the conflict in Iran.
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