No evidence Israeli flag projected on Tehran apartment block

Published on March 19, 2026 at 19:04
3 min read
By Liesa PAUWELS, AFP Netherlands
Translation and adaptation AFP Canada

Social media posts are claiming a video shows Iranians risking their lives to project an Israeli flag on a Tehran building as a display of gratitude for the strikes that killed the Islamic republic's supreme leader. However, an AFP investigation found visual inconstencies indicating it was manipulated, and the audio of people celebrating Ali Khamenei's death was likely taken from another clip.

"Video is verified. The Israeli flag projected on a building in Tehran," says a March 12, 2026 Facebook reel in which cheers and whistles can be heard as the blue-and-white flag is displayed on the side of a high-rise.

The reel highlights another post on X that shared the same clip and said: "This is unbelievable. An Israeli flag is projected onto a building in Ekbatan, Tehran, as a message of gratitude."

Screenshot of a Facebook post taken March 18, 2026

Screenshot of an X post taken March 18, 2026

The video spread rapidly across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, with posts making similar claims in Dutch, German, Romanian, Swedish and Persian amid a regional war sparked by the US-Israeli attacks that killed Khamenei.

One Google search prompted an AI-generated summary that said "recent reports indicate that an Israeli flag was displayed on a building in Tehran," pointing as evidence to an Instagram post from a pro-Israel group that AFP has previously fact-checked.

At the first reports of Khamenei's death, many Iranians erupted into cheers from apartment buildings in the capital Tehran, while others blared car horns and blasted music in the streets.

However, an AFP investigation found no evidence that an Israeli flag was projected onto a building in Ekbatan, a residential neighborhood of Tehran known for its Brutalist architecture.

An advanced search on Google with the keywords "Israeli flag," "Tehran" and "Ekbatan" did not return any official news reports describing an event that matches the scene in the video.

February 28 footage

On the contrary, the searches surfaced an article from Iranian fact-checkers at Factnameh highlighting different footage that appears to have been captured in the same location (archived here).

The buildings in the second clip match the honeycomb-shaped apartment blocks seen in the Ekbatan neighborhood on Google Maps.

That video has been online since at least February 28, as Iranians gathered to celebrate Khamenei's death. The apartment lights are on in the same configuration as in the posts claiming to show an Israeli flag. And, as noted on X by BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, the clip features distinctive whistling sounds that appear to match the audio in flag video (archived here).

But in the February 28 footage, no such flag is visible.

Screenshots taken March 16, 2026 of the manipulated video (L) and the origial video with matching light patterns highlighted by AFP

AFP found the whistling sound was repeated twice in a row in the flag video.

Visual inconsistencies

Other visual clues, such as the flag appearing brighter and of higher quality than the rest of the footage, further suggest the video circulating online is inauthentic.

Given the position of the trees in front of the building, the light of the projection should be obstructed, and the trees' silhouette visible as shadows in front of the flag. That is not the case, however.

The flag also appears to drift as the camera pans across the scene.

At the start of the video, it is aligned with one of the windows. But a few seconds later, it floats to the left. The change suggests a motion-tracking software could have been used to anchor the projection, though the tracking was imperfect.