Old Iran protest footage shared as missile attack on Tel Aviv in March 2026

“PICTURES: How fire broke out in Tel Aviv city Israel after an Iranian attack on the country Sunday night,” reads the caption of an Instagram post translated from Hausa, a local Nigerian language, and published on March 9, 2026. 

Image

Screenshot showing the false post, taken March 17, 2026

The claim, published by a Hausa online media site called “Aminiya Trust”, was shared alongside four images of vehicles either engulfed in flames or completely burnt out.

The claim also appeared in English and was published with a video of the same scenes on Facebook, Instagram and Telegram, as well as in Arabic, Chinese, French, Greek, Macedonian, Malay and Turkish.

War broke out in the Middle East on February 28, 2026, after joint US-Israeli missile strikes killed Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader since 1989, along with some of his family and other senior Iranian officials (archived here). 

Iran responded by targeting US military installations in the region and other Gulf countries with ties to Washington (archived here and here).

However, the images and videos of burning cars are not connected to the war. 

January 2026 protests

Reverse image searches on keyframes from one of the videos with the same visuals led to social media posts published before the war in the Middle East broke out.

For instance, an X post published on January 18, 2026, claimed the video was taken 10 days earlier in Kaj Square, Tehran, during anti-government protests (archived here).

Another X video published in French on the same day repeated the claim, citing an X user called “Vahid” as the source (archived here).

A review of Vahid’s feed located the exact video with the same dates and details about the protests in Kaj Square (archived here). 

“Regime forces' vehicles on fire. Received videos: ‘Kaj Square, Saadat Abad #Tehran, Thursday, January 8, 2026’,” reads the post. 

BBC fact-checker Shayan Sardarizadeh also confirmed the date, location, and authorship in a thread on X, to which another user responded by pointing out several elements that matched the location on Google Street View (archived here and here). 

AFP Fact Check Google Street View analysis supports these findings. From the location identified by these accounts, another view of the square is visible -- a perspective that also appears in the viral video.

Image

Graphics showing the false Instagram post (left) and a screenshot of the location on Google Street View, with matching elements highlighted

The Arabic signage illuminated in the video matches the name of a restaurant located in that part of Tehran.

The date, January 8, 2026, also coincides with the day Iranian authorities cut off internet access amid a wave of anti-government protests driven by rising living costs (archived here and here).

AFP Fact Check also debunked the claim in Spanish.

Read more of our fact-checking work on the Middle East war here.