Fact Check: Israel airport destroyed amid war with Iran? No, AI image goes viral

Hyderabad: As the Israel-Iran-US conflict continues, an image is going viral on social media with the claim that it shows the aftermath of an attack on an Israeli airport.

The image shows a fire truck spraying water on a damaged aeroplane while another one is engulfed in flames. What appears to be an airport terminal building is also damaged, with debris strewn around. Firefighters are present in the image.

Sharing the image on Facebook, a user wrote, “Israeli airport destruction scenes.” (Archive)

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is false. The image is generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Analysis of the image

Reverse image searches of the image did not yield any results about the image being associated with any credible news reports of an attack on an Israeli airport or its aftermath.

Analysing the video closely, we found that the words on the aeroplane are gibberish. This is a usual sign of AI-generated images.

Analysis using AI detection tools

To check whether the image was generated using AI, we used AI detection tools, Hive Moderation and Sight Engine. Sight Engine has determined that the image is 74 per cent likely to be AI-generated, and that it is 24 per cent likely to have been created using Imagen/Nano Banana AI models.

Hive Moderation tool results confirm that the image is 99.9 per cent likely to be AI-generated using Gemini3. Both Nano Banana and Gemini are AI assistants by Google.

Using Google DeepMind’s SynthID detector, we found that the image was created using Google AI. This detector identifies digital watermarks embedded directly into images generated by Google AI. The embedded SynthID was detected on most of the image (blue tiles in the image shown below).

Therefore, it is clear that the viral image is AI-generated. Therefore, NewsMeter concludes that the claim is false.