Do viral images authentically document fires in Tel Aviv, Israel, in the aftermath of Iranian strikes during the June 2025 escalation of the conflict? No, that's not true: The set that purported to show a badly damaged building of a government-owned Israeli defense company displayed a wrong logo. No credible media organization published any of the images while reporting on this round of escalation.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on June 22, 2025. It opened:
This is beautiful!
📍Tel Aviv
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
The image in the bottom right corner showed a brand's name:
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
The same picture had been circulating on social media at least since June 17, 2025 (archived here). Those posts stated that the image showed an Israeli defense company, "Rafael". Headquartered in Haifa (archived here), the company has had a presence in Tel Aviv (archived here), too.
Yet, the symbol before the entity's name in the picture didn't match Rafael's official logo as it appears in English or Hebrew on its website:
(Source: Rafael screenshot by Lead Stories)
Earlier versions of the image in question revealed that what was later covered by a yellow circle showed a firefighter with what appeared to be a tail:
As seen in the screenshot a firefighter was on top of the building's entrance with no shown ladder or other means of getting there.
(Source: Facebook screenshot by Lead Stories)
The overall oversaturated, hyperrealistic uniformed glow in this particular image and other pictures from the set was rather more consistent with generative AI than not.
An AI detection tool offered by the Media Forensics Lab at University of Buffalo assessed the likelihood the images were AI to be 100 percent (archived here):
(Source: zinc.cse.buffalo.edu screenshot by Lead Stories.)
None of the images could be traced back to credible sources or trustworthy news reports.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks concerning the June 2025 conflict between Israel and Iran can be found here.
