Does a viral video show a real-life scene from Tel Aviv when the city was hit with Iranian missiles in March 2026? No, that's not true: The clip originated from an account that disclosed the video was generated by AI. Both online AI detectors and Lead Stories' manual analysis of the video strongly suggested that it was not real footage documenting Iran's retaliation in the aftermath of the Feb. 28, 2026, joint U.S.-Israel attack.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on March 3, 2026, under the caption in Arabic:
إسرائيل تحترق الآن
طارت نومة الظهر
As translated to English by DeepL, it read:
Israel is burning now.
The afternoon nap flew away.
This is what the video with the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post from @alshayakhliu1 on X.)
On March 3, 2026, Israel's military reported (archived here) that Iranian strikes had hit central parts of Israel, including Tel Aviv, but the viral video reviewed in this article did not show genuine damage.
Lead Stories downloaded the clip and tested it with the content detection tool hivemoderation.com. According to it, the probability of the video being the product of generative AI was 98.3%:
(Image source: screenshot from Hive Moderation.)
Sightengine concluded that the clip is 98% likely to be AI:
(Image source: screenshot from Sightengine.)
Both Hive Moderation and Sightengine suggested that the viral video was made by Sora, an AI tool frequently used to generate fake or misleading videos between fall 2025 and March 2026.
Another tool, Illuminarty, concluded the probability of the frame being AI-generated exceeded 90.7%
(Image source: screenshot from Illuminarty.)
The lowest AI score was produced by AI or Not, but even that was 79%:
(Image source: screenshot from AI or Not.)
The video also contained several artifacts that point to the conclusion it was artificially generated. The smoke over what seemed to be a heavily impacted site somehow did not stick. Instead it started to flow away in batches in seconds, producing strange shapes in the process:
(Image source: screenshot of the video's keyframes from InVid.)
(Image source: post from @alshayakhliu1 on X.)
Additionally, some cars parked in the street that didn't appear to have been hit were already deformed:
(Image source: post from @alshayakhliu1 on X.)
The clip originated from two interlinked accounts on Facebook (archived here) and Instagram (archived here) that published the video on March 2, 2026, under identical captions that seemed to be prompts for text-to-video AI tools:
The footage begins from a distant vantage point overlooking Tel Aviv, the camera already zoomed in toward the skyline. High-rise buildings form a dense silhouette against the sky as sirens wail faintly in the background. The person filming stands far away, keeping the entire cityscape within frame.
Suddenly, a bright streak appears overhead, descending rapidly toward the city. The camera shakes slightly as the filmer adjusts their zoom ...
Each description of the video ended with a phrase:
This video is created with AI and is intended for entertainment purposes only.
