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Claim: An X user on Sunday, April 14, 2024, posted a picture claiming Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
Verdict: Misleading. DUBAWA’s findings reveal that the photo used is AI-generated.
Full Text
Iran unleashed an attack on Israel between the night of Saturday, April 13, 2024 and early on Sunday, April 14. The attack lasted about five hours, according to United States officials. This is suspected to be a retaliation for an Israeli strike on its consulate in Damascus, which killed 13 people.
Daniel Hagari, Israel’s chief military spokesperson, said Iran’s attack involved more than 120 ballistic missiles, 170 drones and more than 30 cruise missiles, according to a report by The Associated Press news agency.
The event’s aftermath has generated several claims and counterclaims online, including photos used to illustrate the event.
An X user, @Nadira_ali12, posted a photo to depict Iran’s attack on Israel on Sunday, April 14, 2024.
“Iran’s attack on Israel is the longest range attack in history🔥,” the post was captioned.
As of Tuesday, April 16, 2024, the post had garnered over 67,000 views, 1,208 likes, 310 comments and 216 reposts.
The same photo was posted by an X user, @gani_jonathan, on Saturday, April 13, 2024.
The user posted, “Over 100 drones from Iran to hit Israel in a couple of hours. I pray this doesn’t deteriorate into World War 3,” the post was captioned
Meanwhile, another X user, @moKapendi, also posted the same photo on April 13, 2024, saying,
“Is this an AI-generated image or Iran just got bigger balls? Interesting days ahead.😳Israel, Palestine, America, Russia.”
DUBAWA decided to verify the image’s authenticity due to the engagement in the posts and the contradictory claims and representations of the image by the X users.
Verification
DUBAWA conducted a Google Reverse Image Search to find the photo’s origin and discovered that it had been circulating online before Iran attacked Israel.
We discovered the photo was posted by an X user @army20300 on Feb 28, 2024, with another caption.
Although posted in the Arabic language, when translated by Google, the post reads,
“Yesterday, our drones clashed with the new European coalition, the shield coalition, along with the criminal American-British alliance. The seabed is ready for war.”
Also, a search for how Iran attacked Israel on several reputable news websites gave a stark contrast.
DUBAWA observed that a publication on Aljazeera indicated that the attack happened at night instead of the photo, suggesting the event occurred in the afternoon.
Also, in a report by Reuters, an anti-missile system was observed to be operated in defence of Israel.
Also, the photo shows several fighter planes, which contrast with missiles and drones firing, as major news outlets claim.
Also, DUBAWA subjected the image to Artificial intelligence detector tools.
According to an AI image detector, Hive Moderation, it concludes that there was a 98.6% likelihood that the image was AI-generated or deep fake content.
When the image was also placed into Content at Scale, the toolset’s AI status was 99%, which suggests that it was AI-generated.
Conclusion
The photo used to illustrate Iran’s attack on Israel is misleading. According to several verification tools, the image is AI-generated. Also, it is in contrast to several photos released via reputable news media.
This report was produced for DUBAWA 2024 Kwame KariKari Fellowship in partnership with The Informant247 to facilitate the ethos of “truth” in journalism and enhance media literacy in the country.
