What was claimed
A video shows buses in Tel Aviv on fire following a drone attack by Yemen.
Our verdict
False. This is an old clip that is not related to recent events. It shows buses on fire in 2022 in the northern Israeli city of Safed.
Video of buses on fire falsely connected to recent attacks in Israel
4 October 2024
A clip is being shared on social media with the false claim it shows “Tel Aviv on fire” as a result of drone attacks by Yemen.
The video shows multiple buses on fire with smoke billowing into the air. It has been shared on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) with captions including: “Update: Report that a Yemen Houthi suicide attack drone hit a target in Tel Aviv tonight!!”
But the clip comes from 2022 and depicts an incident where 18 buses caught fire at a central station in Safed, which is a city in northern Israel. The same clip was shared by multiple local media organisations at the time. There were reportedly no casualties in what was a suspected case of arson.
Several posts refer to an article published by Press TV—an Iranian English-language news network—that captions the video: “Frame grab from a video captured in Tel Aviv on October 3, 2024 shows a fire burning in the city after it was hit by a barrage of kamikaze drones.” A kamikaze drone is a term used to describe those that are deliberately crashed into targets.
The article goes on to say: “No party has claimed responsibility for the incident so far. It, however, came a day after Yemen’s Armed Forces fired three cruise missiles at strategic installations lying deep inside the occupied Palestinian territories.”
While Israel said it intercepted a surface-to-surface missile fired from Yemen on 27 September, this clip is not related to recent events in the region and does not show Tel Aviv, as explained above.
The Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been firing drones and missiles towards Israel since the war in Gaza began after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, which have mostly been intercepted. The Houthis recently reported that four people were killed and 29 wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a port in Yemen.
We’ve seen many examples of videos that falsely claim to show recent events in the Middle East, which are usually clips of different conflicts or older events with incorrect captions. For advice about how to verify videos yourself, read our guide.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the video was filmed in Israel in 2022 and is not related to recent events.