What was claimed
A video shows a recent fire in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Our verdict
The video is of a factory fire in Taiwan in 2023 and was uploaded to several stock image websites last year. It is unrelated to recent events in Israel.
Video of ‘Tel Aviv destroyed by Iran’ actually of Taiwan factory fire
7 October 2024
A video claiming to show a fire in Tel Aviv, Israel, has been shared on Threads, but is actually an unrelated video taken of a factory fire in Taiwan in 2023.
The video shows a large fire producing lots of smoke and is captioned: “I’m old enough to remember when tel aviv had this micaculous [sic] thing called electricity. Amazing stuff. Sadly such a long time ago now. Darkness. Fires. So sad”.
The post implies that the video is recent, and was posted on 1 October, the same day Iran launched more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel.
But the video is actually drone footage of a fire at an acrylic sheet manufacturing plant in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan last year.
A TikTok account posted the same video in May this year overlaid with the text: “Tel Aviv Israel Destroyed by attack of Iran Contra with 132 Missiles”, which now has almost 125,000 views. It posted at least two other videos of very similar footage with claims they showed Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
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Finding the original video
The video being shared on Threads appears to have been flipped horizontally, as can be seen with the backwards watermark “iStock by Getty”. The original clip was uploaded to iStock by Getty Images in July 2023 and captioned “Aerial view of Fire in industrial building. Multi-storey concrete hangar with flames.”
Getty told us metadata for this video also describes its location as Taiwan, which Full Fact has verified using satellite imagery available on Google Earth Pro.
The green roof on a white building, next to two long white hangers, in front of a modern building with distinctive small rectangular windows, matches 2022 satellite imagery for the Sumipex TechSheet acrylic factory in south Taiwan, which caught fire on 14 July 2023.
A similar photo taken by drone and uploaded to the Alamy stock image site states it was taken on 14 July.
Google Street View from before the fire in 2020 also shows the white building next to the hangars and the newer building with its unusual windows behind. Newer street view imagery shows the large hangers are no longer there.
Miscaptioned videos are a common form of misinformation. We’ve seen lots of examples circulating online recently connected to the conflict in the Middle East.
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 clip was taken in Taiwan in July 2023 and unrelated to recent events in Israel.