Did Israeli Channel 13 and Al Jazeera confirm that Hezbollah partially or wholly captured Kiryat Shmona? No, that's not true: There's no reliable evidence to support that claim. Neither news organization reported that Hezbollah fighters had taken Israel's northernmost city, located near its border with Lebanon, although the community has been largely evacuated due to ongoing cross-border attacks.
The claim appeared in a post and video (archived here) by the @Truthtellerftm account on X on March 30, 2026. It read:
Hezbollah has taken the town of Kiryat Shmona in ISRAEL! Major L for the Epstein coalition!
This is the first time in its history that Israel has lost an enclave in its territory.
The IDF has retreated after losing its main base!
Channel 13 and Al-Jazeera have allegedly confirmed this!
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @Truthtellerftm on X.com.)
You can see the post and video here:
Hezbollah has taken the town of Kiryat Shmona in ISRAEL! Major L for the Epstein coalition!
-- Truth_teller 🇷🇺 (@Truthtellerftm) March 30, 2026
This is the first time in its history that Israel has lost an enclave in its territory.
The IDF has retreated after losing its main base!
Channel 13 and Al-Jazeera have allegedly... https://t.co/Tt0wVHWARA pic.twitter.com/ky6WJsU6sF
Neither Israel's Channel 13 nor Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, reported a full or partial capture of Kiryat Shmona in March 2026. A search (archived here) of the Channel 13 website in Hebrew found "no results for 'Capture Kiryat Shmona (לכוד את קריית שמונה).'" A search (archived here) of Al Jazeera's English website also found no reports of Kiryat Shmona being captured.
Lead Stories also searched Google News (archived here) and Yahoo! News (archived here), and did not find any matching reports for "Hezbollah captured Kiryat Shmona" for March 2026. The world's media would have widely reported such an event.
Image analysis
In addition to no news reports confirming the capture of Kiryat Shmona, the image in the post reporting the alleged capture is fake. The Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool concluded the image was 100 percent "likely to be AI-generated":
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
