Does a viral video show Israeli troops being attacked by Hezbollah in Lebanon? No, that's not true: The same footage has been online since 2017. The video's earliest version showed a logo of a Syrian rebel group. It was published with explicit references to the situation in Syria.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 3, 2024. It said:
🇱🇧🇮🇱Hezbollah showed how it cheerfully shoots an ATGM at a column of occupiers infantry who are marching in tight formation along the road.
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Oct 4 14:42:21 2024 UTC)
Posted three days after Israel publicly acknowledged (archived here) that it had begun a ground operation in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the post implied that the footage captured the Israeli army being attacked in Lebanon by anti-tank guided missiles (archived here), also known as AGTM.
But the video was not brand-new.
According to a TinEye reverse image search, it has been circulating on the internet since 2017:
(Source: TinEye screenshot taken on Fri Oct 4 15:35:13 2024 UTC)
Although the video was not available via any of the links seen above as of this writing, a Google reverse image search led to an October 2, 2024, post on X (archived here) that offered an uncropped version of the footage. The caption, as automatically translated by X, suggested that the video has been online for years:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Oct 4 16:14:14 2024 UTC)
The uncropped version of the footage showed a visible rotating logo in the top left corner:
(Sources: X screenshots taken on Fri Oct 4 between 16:19:43 and 16:19:14 2024 UTC; composite image by Lead Stories)
One side of the logo used the colors of the Syrian flag (archived here); the other one was consistent with the logo in the videos published by one of the Syrian rebel groups -- initially Hama-based Jaish al Izza (archived here), also known as the Army of Glory:
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Fri Oct 4 20:43:09 2024 UTC; automatically translated by Chrome)
Further searches led to two tweets seen here (archived here) and here (archived here), confirming that the video was uploaded on the internet in 2017:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Oct 4 16:59:24 2024 UTC)
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Oct 4 17:01:50 2024 UTC)
One more example was a news report in Arabic (archived here):
(Source: Enabbaladi screenshot taken on Fri Oct 4 17:09:04 2024 UTC; translated by Chrome)
The fact that the earliest instances of the video go back to late April 2017 is consistent with news coverage in English-language sources from that time. Discussing fighting around Hama, one report (archived here) specifically said that Jaish al Izza rebels participated in the battle that ended with government forces taking over the city.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims about Hezbollah in Lebanon can be found here. Our fact checks of claims about Israel and Lebanon are here.
