Does a real video show the moment a Houthi missile hit a Saudia airliner parked near an airport terminal in Riyadh? No, that's not true: A Saudia airliner really was destroyed in attacks at the King Khalid International Airport on Oct. 8, 2026, but the footage of the missile blowing the plane apart is fabricated. Real photos and videos do not show the missile strike, only the aftermath with the smoldering wreckage of the plane in a different location than is pictured in the fake video.
The video appeared in a post (archived here) by the @HatemSaleh_ account on X on Oct. 8, 2026. The Arabic caption automatically translated by Grok read:
Urgent | 🚨
New video footage of the moment King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital Riyadh was targeted.
This is what a screenshot of the video in the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @HatemSaleh_ on X.)
This Lead Stories GIF of the @HatemSaleh_ video was made with the Clipchamp app:
(GIF source: post by @HatemSaleh_ on X.)
A missile attack did occur on Oct. 8, 2026, at the Riyadh Airport in Saudi Arabia. A Reuters report on the incident published by NBC News (archived here) says "Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis said on Thursday they had attacked the airport with two cruise missiles". A search for the phrase "Riyadh King Khalid Airport" with Google News (archived here) and Yahoo News (archived here) show reports from news organizations around the world. The reports include several photos and videos of a large plume of smoke rising or the smoldering wreckage of the destroyed Saudia airliner. None of the images circulating at the time of writing show the moment the missile struck the airplane. Pictured below is a photo published by The Telegraph (archived here).
It is clear that the roofline of this portion of the terminal and the proximity of the plane to the building in the real photo do not match what is shown in the @HatemSaleh_ video.
(Image source: The Telegraph.)
Lead Stories uploaded the @HatemSaleh_ video and screenshots from the video to several AI-generated content detection tools: Hive Moderation, SynthID Detector, Sightengine, Verify, and TruthScan. These tools did not detect a strong signal that an AI generating tool was the origin of the video. This does not mean the video was not made with AI, just that if it was, it was not detectable by these platforms.
Reviewing the video in slow motion reveals glitches typical of what might be seen in an AI-generated video. The GIF below shows a cropped detail of the scene at half speed. A golfcart-sized service vehicle transforms as the blast throws it, appearing like a flat cardboard cutout of a vehicle rather than a solid, three-dimensional object. As the now-unrecognizable debris tumbles across the tarmac it get smaller and smaller. When it comes to rest it is about the size of a front quarter panel.
(GIF source: detail from post by @HatemSaleh_ on X.)
This GIF also reveals a misreading of the scene by the tool which added the explosion effects. The little white vehicle is rendered with a yellow front, but this yellow is actually part of the lift that happens to be visually overlapped with the white vehicle in the scene.
Lead Stories used Google Lens (archived here) to look for the image which may have been used to create this video. One photo on Shutterstock (archived here) came close, but was not a perfect match (pictured below left). It is captioned:
Riyadh - March 01: Planes preparing for take off at Riyadh King Khalid Airport on March 01, 2016 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Riyadh airport is home port for Saudi Arabian Airlines.
The photo shows a Saudia airliner parked in front of the unique terminal with a roofline of curved elements. Three of the five doors on the left side of the plane are open, only the front door has a stairway. Surrounding the plane is an assortment of service vehicles, baggage trolleys, lifts, stairways, and shuttle buses. One notable detail is that there are two orange traffic cones on a distinctive avenue of the concrete tarmac -- and one of the cones is tipped over on its side. On the left side of the Shutterstock image are two tall connected poles supporting large racks of lighting. In the screenshot from @HatemSaleh_ video (shown earlier in this fact check), the lower portion of these poles are visible, but the fixtures of the upper portion are entirely missing. This happens to be in line with where the missile will pass in the video. This is another clue that the @HatemSaleh_ video is not real.
(Image source: Shutterstock and @HatemSaleh_ on X.)
The opening frame of the @HatemSaleh_ video (above right) shows the Shutterstock scene from a slightly higher vantage point a little to the right. Again, three of the plane's five doors are open, and only one has a stairway. In both images the concrete tarmac is divided by a grid of expansion joints, and the even grid pattern is broken up by two narrow lanes of slabs which pass under the plane just behind the wings. This concrete is a lighter color than the rest of the paving, and is marred by a dark stain crossing perpendicularly. In both images there are two traffic cones, the one closer to the plane is tipped on its side and positioned at the expansion joint. The composite image below shows a detail of the cones: the 2016 image from Shutterstock (top) and the video from @HatemSaleh_ (bottom). These uncanny coincidences suggests that the reference image used to make the fake missile strike video came from a photo taken on March 1, 2016, the same day as the Shutterstock image.
(Image source: Shutterstock and @HatemSaleh_ on X.)
