Fact-Check Dispatch: On the digital frontlines of the Iran-Israel war
Misrepresented and AI-generated content fuel information war online
The Israel-Iran conflict isn't just playing out on battlefields; a fierce information war is raging online.
Since the war began, members of the Eurovision News Spotlight network have been working tirelessly behind the scenes, sifting through the deluge of content from both sides to expose manipulation and verify the truth.
In this edition of the Fact-Check Dispatch, we see how quickly misleading content emerges, from repurposed old videos to sophisticated AI-generated deepfakes.
We'll delve into specific examples, revealing how readily old footage is recontextualised and how advanced AI tools are now weaponised to distort realities and inflame narratives, making the online landscape increasingly treacherous for anyone seeking accurate information.
Here’s our fact-check dispatch.
Operation Rising Lion
Due to limited internet access and a reliance on government and military sources for information about significant events in Iran, members of the Spotlight network heavily relied on geolocation techniques to verify the accuracy of their content. They also used these methods to explain the stories to their audiences.
Maria Flannery and Derek Bowler of Eurovision News Spotlight cross-matched IDF video and graphics with Google Earth and satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies to build an accurate map of the nuclear sites being targeted by Israel last week, and over the weekend, the United States.
Earlier in the week, Israel said it was targeting a number of above-ground nuclear facilities, including Natanz, Isfahan, Arak/Khondab, and a number of offices and manufacturing facilities in Tehran that Israel said were linked to the nuclear programme.
In the background, speculation grew about what it wanted to do about Fordo, a fortified uranium enrichment facility built deep within a mountain. Bowler and Flannery write: “Constructed in 2006, the Fordo facility is located approximately 80 metres (260 feet) underground. Officials stated that the decision to build the facility underground was made due to threats from Israel to conduct air strikes on such installations.”
The site was widely understood to be beyond the reach of any of the bombs in use by Israel, despite the fact that Netanyahu had claimed that his army was capable of hitting all of Iran’s nuclear facilities. The weapon that could reach it? American-made “bunker-buster” bombs — formally named GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators —the heaviest non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal at 13,600 kg.
Days after this analysis, this topic of much speculation did indeed come to pass, with the U.S. deploying its B-2 Spirit bombers to drop several “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo in a mission that also struck Isfahan and Natanz in the early hours of Sunday morning.
With the news that U.S. bombers had hit Fordo, BBC Verify’s Visual Journalism team published detailed maps showing the landscape around the underground facility and comparing the before and after satellite imagery that confirmed the strike sites and gave us more insight into how many bombs were dropped on it.
While speculation reigned in the West about whether or not the U.S. would get directly involved, other information was being released in Iran, as the France24 Observers write.
“Israeli drones successfully neutralised several of the Islamic Republic's anti-air defences deep inside its territory. What is particularly surprising is that some of these drones were manufactured in covert production facilities deep within Iran. Iranian state TV has broadcast images showing camouflaged lorries and vans that were used to transport the drones, as well as images of the makeshift FPV factories,” the team writes.
Such images would be impossible to independently verify as there is very little information to work with in terms of geolocation. To analyse them, the reporters spoke to an expert on Iranian weaponry, Farzin Nadimi, who said: “We have known for many years about the deep infiltration of Israeli assets, almost at every level of the IRGC, the IRGC intelligence service, other intelligence services of Iran, the military and among politicians.”
Nadimi told France24 that much of the Iranian intelligence services are trained for internal security risks, such as protests and enforcing domestic repression, which they see as a more urgent threat than a foreign attack. On the drones, he said it would not be too complicated to smuggle parts into Iran, but added: “For a complex mission like this, however, you can't rely entirely on locals and local assets, you need to have agents on the ground. They had planned this for a long time. They claim to have been working on this plan for many years.”
As Israel pounded Iranian facilities earlier in the week, SVT Verifierar tracked the damage inflicted on Isfahan, Natanz, and Kermanshah, which has been named as a base for ballistic missiles. Maria Lapenkova, Ellika Nilsson, and Simon Krona mapped the damage using satellite imagery, and tied together videos from the incidents with damage visible in Maxar imagery.
Misrepresented content distorting facts in real time
For those looking to discover, verify, and clear the rights to eyewitness media during a breaking news story, there is a golden window of about 30 minutes before the landscape becomes inundated with old, unrelated videos repurposed by users to appear as part of a story.
As social media matures and the use of AI-generated content accelerates, that window is shrinking rapidly. The ongoing war between Israel and Iran has significantly contributed to a surge of misrepresented content online, making it more challenging to separate the news from the noise.
Baghdad 2003
Staying with content maturity, Maria Flannery of Eurovision News Spotlight investigated a viral TikTok video posted with a claim it showed a heavy bombardment of Israel on June 17.
The video (archived here) was posted with onscreen text reading: “Iran Has Launched The Largest Attack On Israel In History. Today 17/06/25. Iran New Wave Of Missile Hitting Israel.”
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A reverse image search on Google Lens of different stills from the video yielded numerous examples of it being shared in recent days.
“However, it also pulled up a near-match from a CNN link titled: ‘Iconic moments from 2003 Iraq War’. The video thumbnail looked very similar, but unfortunately the website’s video player was not working at the time of writing,” Flannery writes.
“After this, we carried out manual searches online to find archive material from the Iraq War. It led us to this — a video on the ITN Archive YouTube page titled: ‘Iraq War: Shock and Awe Assault on Baghdad Begins (2003)’,” she continues. Buildings, the general landscape and even the nighttime lighting of the areas struck matched scenes from the viral TikTok video.
“Another unusual aspect of the TikTok video is how it appears to feature the sounds of shocked eyewitnesses, even though we now know a news crew professionally filmed it in a war zone,” Flannery reported, adding that the audio — which did not sound like Arabic, Hebrew or Farsi — was likely added to the TikTok to make it appear more realistic.
The team at DW Fact Check also debunked Baghdad 2003 footage after analysing a one-minute compilation published on TikTok (archived here) described as showing multiple bombings from the air, explosions and fire at night in Iran.
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“A reverse image search of stills from the compilation reveals two sources that prove the time and place for sequences of the video. The first sequence of the TikTok video is part of a longer video compilation of a bombing at night in Iraq, published by the US media outlet CNN,” write Uta Steinwehr and Adnan Sidibe.
Itamar Ben Gvir and Omer Bar-Lev
Nora Litoussi of France 24 looked at a trending video showing a heated exchange between Israeli politicians, Itamar Ben Gvir and Omer Bar-Lev, with posters claiming that the two politicians were fighting after the Iranian strikes carried out on June 13, 2025.
However, Litoussi reports that the conversation took place in March 2022 and has no ties to the current conflict.
“We ran the video through a reverse image search (see our easy guide to find out how to do one yourself). We discovered by doing this that the same video was published online back in March 2022 on the X account of the Israeli TV channel, Kan – a full three years before the current conflict between Israel and Iran broke out. The video actually shows a confrontation between the two men that took place on March 27, 2022, in the Israeli city of Hadera after a deadly attack took place there,” Litoussi writes.
Staying at France 24, Nathan Gallo investigated online claims that several Chinese aircraft have landed in Iran to supply the country with weapons.
Screenshots shared online from the air traffic monitoring site Flightradar24 (archived here and here) showed that flights operated by Luxembourg cargo airline Cargolux on June 14, 15 and 16 arrived in Iran. However, so far, none of the Flightradar24 screenshots posted online since Friday show any aircraft heading for Iran, Gallo reports.
“When contacted by the FRANCE 24 team, the Flightradar24 website explained that the aircraft icons that appear to be flying over Iran are in fact only ‘estimation data’ shown ‘when a user clicks on a flight’, to give an indication of the direction in which the aircraft should be heading. ‘Estimated positions are noted by the black trail colour,’ Ian Petchenik, the company's communications director, told our editors,” Gallo writes.
AI-generated content intensifies online war narratives
Since Israel launched a widespread attack on Iranian installations and facilities on June 13, AI-generated content has continued to fuel misinformation and disinformation online. This surge isn't just about the volume of false narratives; it's about their sophistication and reach.
Advanced AI models are being used to create deepfakes of political leaders making inflammatory statements, generate fabricated news reports that mimic legitimate media outlets, and even produce realistic-looking images and videos of events that never occurred.
Lea Deseille of France Info investigated a video purported to show a convoy of military vehicles (archived here) carrying dozens of Iranian missiles from a mountainous cave.
Posted by a pro-Iranian account, the video has garnered over 2.1 million views since it was posted on X on June 18.
“Upon closer inspection, we quickly notice that the mountains and rocks at the bottom right are moving in an unnatural manner. Everything suggests that the scene is not real,” Deseille writes.
Similarly, the team at VerificaRTVE examined further video (archived here) which claimed to show Iranian forces mobilising with missiles.
The team found several inconsistencies throughout the 36-second-long video, including the merging of soldiers into one, soldiers randomly appearing and disappearing, and malformations in the hands of those in the video.
“We analysed the video with an advanced AI-generated content detection tool (Decopy.AI), and the platform concluded that it was generated with this technology with a 95.94% reliability in prediction,” VerificaRTVE writes.
Michael Schlegel and Fabian Dilger of BR24’s #Faktenfuchs looked at a video claiming to show destroyed aircraft at an Israeli airport (archived here) after an alleged strike, a video which the duo determined was AI-generated.
“The passenger windows of the front two planes appear to be floating in the air in places where, in the video, holes are actually torn into the planes' fuselages. Furthermore, the ambulances appear to be moving at the same speed. One of the ambulances even drives through the frame twice in the same position,” Schlegel and Dilger write.
“One thing is certain: the airport video does not show real footage from the war between Israel and Iran in June 2025,” the pair reported.
After the United States military struck nuclear sites inside Iran overnight into June 22, a video (archived here) purported to show the aftermath of “America destroying Iranian nuclear reactors”.
The video was debunked by Derek Bowler for Eurovision News Spotlight, who wrote: “A Google Lens search of the video revealed an earlier version from June 18, in which the creator describes the footage as “Big explosion in a city | ai video.”
The emergence of Google Veo into the misinformation landscape
One of the tools being used to spread instances of misinformation and disinformation online is Google Veo. The text-to-video generative AI model, developed by Google DeepMind, creates high-quality, realistic videos up to 8 seconds long based on user text prompts, and can also generate accompanying audio.
Across the Atlantic, Jeff Yates and Nicholas De Rosa of Radio Canada debunked a video that claimed to show Iranian missiles hitting a building in Tel Aviv (Archived here).
A cropped, low-resolution version of the video was shared by Maram Susli, also known as Syrian Girl, who claimed the footage showed a strike on Tel Aviv.
Yates and De Rosa found that the video was generated using Google Veo.
“Despite what this account claims, the video is fake. Other copies of this same video exist where the Veo logo can clearly be seen,” they report.
At Deutsche Welle, Kathrin Wesolowski and Adnan Sidibe sought answers on a viral TikTok video (Archived here) which claimed to show Israelis protesting against the war with Iran, chanting for peace.
“This video allegedly shows hundreds of Israelis protesting against Israel's ‘war on Iran’. People in the streets waving Israeli flags are shouting: ‘Stop the war. Iran, we are sorry. We want peace!’ The video has been viewed more than 4.9 million times and shared on several social media platforms like Facebook,” Wesolowski and Sidibe report.
Wesolowski and Sidibe note several key inconsistencies in the video, including mouth movements and limbs that disappear and reappear. They also note that the video bears the Google Veo watermark and is eight seconds long—the typical length of a Veo-generated video.