Does a photo on social media show a retaliatory strike on the Iranian capital of Tehran, following Iran's drone attack on Israel on April 13, 2024? No, that's not true: The picture is not from 2024. It is a photo from the Getty Images catalogue, taken in June 2021 during an oil refinery fire south of Tehran.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X (formerly Twitter) by Joe Roberts on April 13, 2024. The post's caption said:
🚨🚨BREAKING🚨🚨
Massive explosion reported in Tehran.
The response has begun.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Sat Apr 13 21:40:07 2024 UTC)
The photograph
The photograph in the social media post had nothing to do with hostilities between Iran and Israel in April 2024. Lead Stories discovered the picture was from an oil refinery fire near the Iranian capital on June 2, 2021.
Lead Stories found the photo by doing a reverse image search on TinEye (archived here), an image search and recognition website. The results led us to an Associated Press story published in The Globe and Mail (archived here) that included the same picture. It appears below:
(Source: The Globe and Mail screenshot taken on Sat Apr 13 22:30:39 2024 UTC)
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Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about Iran and Israel can be found here.
