Fake image spreads of Palestinian flag on Spain World Cup parade bus
- Published on July 23, 2026 at 17:54
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
An estimated two million people turned up to cheer the Spanish men's national football team's 2026 FIFA World Cup victory as the squad paraded through the streets of Madrid, but an image of star Lamine Yamal and teammates Gavi and Yeremy Pino celebrating with a Palestinian flag draped over the side of the bus was altered using artificial intelligence.
"Spain and Yamal with the Palestine flag during the World Cup celebrations," says a July 21, 2026 post sharing the image on Threads.
Similar posts spread in multiple languages across Facebook, Instagram and X after the July 20 parade saw Spain's players pass around the gleaming World Cup trophy and wave to adoring supporters from atop buses rolling through the country's capital.
La Roja defeated Argentina 1-0 in the July 19 World Cup final behind an extra-time goal from Ferran Torres, marking the country's second-ever World Cup victory.
Teenage phenom Yamal, who is Muslim and was born to immigrant parents from Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, previously made headlines in May when he held a Palestinian flag from atop a bus during his club team FC Barcelona's parade commemorating its La Liga title.
During the World Cup parade, the national team's livestream captured some Palestinian flags among the sea of supporters in red and yellow (archived here).
But the broadcast never showed a Palestinian flag hanging from the bus in front of Yamal, Gavi and Pino, according to AFP's review of the footage.
AFP photos from the event also show no Palestinian flag on display.
In fact, the image depicting such a scene is a fake, altered with AI.
Reverse image searches surfaced the original photo jointly posted to Instagram by Madrid-based photographer Natalia Garcia and the sports media company Pace T3N (archived here). Yamal, Gavi and Pino are holding the same positions, but no Palestinian flag is visible.
The Mexico City news website La Razón de México also posted the photo to X, with credit to Garcia (archived here).
Further searches traced the altered version to the Instagram user "@artist.mans," whose bio on the platform mentions "AI design" and whose page is filled with AI-generated content. In a July 22 direct message, the account owner confirmed to AFP that he created the image using artificial intelligence.
He said he used "many" AI applications to do so, including ChatGPT and Adobe Photoshop.
AFP could not independently verify the use of those programs, but multiple AI detection tools corroborated that the technology was involved.
Google's SynthID detection tool found the image contains a SynthID, an invisible watermark the company says is attached to AI content made with its technologies. The Hive Moderation tool likewise determined that the visual was "likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content," attributing it to Gemini.
Unsurface, another media authentication tool based on peer-reviewed methods, also found "forensic traces" that the image was AI-generated, while the InVid-WeVerify tool's AI detector found "very strong evidence" that it was synthetic.
AFP previously debunked other AI images depicting Yamal wrapped in a Palestinian flag and holding a Palestinian keffiyeh on the pitch after the World Cup final.
Read more fact-checks about the World Cup here.
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