A photo shows a broken silver ring which identified the body of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah following his death in an Israeli airstrike on 27 September.
This isn’t true. While we cannot confirm for certain who the ring belonged to, the same image has been circulating online since January 2024 with claims it belonged to a killed Iraqi militant commander—months before Hassan Nasrallah’s death.
An image of a broken ring is being shared on social media with false claims it was worn by the killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and was how his body was identified.
The photo shows a person’s hand holding a damaged silver ring, along with a scrap of paper with arabic writing, and another broken piece of silverware or jewellery.
It is circulating on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook with the caption: “Nasrallah's ring. His body was identified by it.”
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah had been the leader of the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon from 1992 until he was killed in an airstrike by Israel on Beirut on 27 September.
However, the claims that the ring in the picture belonged to him and was found with his body, are not supported by evidence.
We found that the same image has been circulating on social media platforms since at least January 2024.
It appeared on X in a post from 5 January with a caption in Arabic (translated by Google) saying: “What remains of our martyr #Leader Abu Taqwa.”
It was also posted by another account in Arabic on 7 January, with the caption, (translated to English by an Arabic speaker for Full Fact): “Mushtaq Kazim Al-Jawari, known as Abu Taqwa Al-Saeedi, this is all that remains of him.”
The United States carried out an airstrike in Baghdad, Iraq, on 4 January which killed Mushtaq Jawad Kazim al-Jawari—a leader of the Harakat al-Nujaba group operating in Iraq and Syria, who was also known as Abu Taqwa.
While we cannot confirm that the ring belonged to him, these instances of the image pre-date the death of Hassan Nazrallah by over eight months.
The same image was also claimed in a different X post in January to have belonged to a Hamas official, Hassan Akasha, who the Israel Defense Force reported to have killed in Syria.
And the picture of the ring also circulated in April alongside claims it belonged to the Iranian Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who was killed in an attack by Israel on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria on 2 April.
During major unfolding news events we often see miscaptioned images and videos being shared widely on social media. Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict we have debunked an old video claiming to show citizens celebrating Hassan Nasrallah’s death and footage falsely claimed to be of recent protests against the Iranian government.
It’s important to consider whether what you are seeing is real before amplifying it. and our guides to spotting misleading images and videos can help you do this.
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 same image of the ring has been circulating since at least January 2024, meaning it could not have been found with the body of Hassan Nasrallah when he was killed on 27 September.
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