Israel’s military launched a series of strikes on Lebanon’s capital October 20, 2024, targeting financial institutions with ties to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah. Shortly after the bombings, social media users shared two AI-generated images and falsely claimed they showed one of the attacks near Beirut’s main airport.
“A PHOTO FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS MEA airline landing in Beirut International Airport as Israeli rains fire on the airport,” says an October 20 X post from Sulaiman Ahmed, a creator who has previously monetized misinformation about Israel’s war with Hamas.
The post accumulated more than 20,000 likes. Another one says: “A Middle East Airlines civilian plane landing at Beirut International Airport while the bombing of the suburbs.”
The posts share two images supposedly showing a flight from Lebanon’s national flag carrier, Middle East Airlines, landing at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport with explosions in the background.
The same images and claims have circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube and Gettr — including in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, Malayalam, Thai and Malaysian. Iranian state media and Kremlin-aligned news sources further amplified them.
In 2006, a UN Security Council resolution ended the war between Israel and Hezbollah, which killed around 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and 160 in Israel, most of them soldiers.
Following Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Hezbollah began low-intensity cross-border strikes in support of its Palestinian ally.
The Israeli military hit back, and the ensuing near-daily exchange of fire forced tens of thousands of people on both sides to flee their homes.
After nearly a year of war in Gaza, Israel shifted its focus to Lebanon, vowing to fight Hezbollah until its northern border is secure and until the displaced can return home. It says 29 Israeli soldiers have died in clashes with Hezbollah.
Israel’s strikes on Beirut primarily targeted branches of Al-Qard al-Hassan, a bank that US officials have said serves as a financial network for Hezbollah (archived here).
Beirut’s international airport has been under threat for weeks as Israel strikes sites in the capital city, but Lebanon’s transport minister previously told AFP he has received “assurances” from Israeli officials that the airport would not be targeted. A Lebanese security official said Middle East Airlines flights were forced to switch landing strips on October 21 because the strikes hit too close to the main runway.
However, the images shared online do not show one of these planes.
A spokesperson for Middle East Airlines told AFP in an October 21 email that the images appear to be AI-generated and are “far from reality.”
A keyword search of public social media pages reveals the first handful of Instagram accounts that posted the pictures. They say the pictures were created using artificial intelligence and credit the profile south.to.north (archived here and here).
The two AI-generated images no longer appear on the original user’s page, but it does feature similar-looking pictures uploaded around the same time (archived here).
Matthew Stamm, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University (archived here), said that while his forensic analysis was inconclusive, he found several “irregularities” suggesting the images were artificially generated.
Siwei Lyu, director of the University of Buffalo’s Media Forensic Lab (archived here), also pointed out multiple “artifacts” in the planes he said are “clearly” inauthentic.
Among them are a light pole that passes through the tail of one of the planes, the bizarre shape of the landing gear and the angle of one of the plane’s wings.
The Lebanese flag painted on the plane’s tail also looks different from the cedar tree on Middle East Airlines vessels.
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Despite most airlines stopping service to Beirut due to the regional conflict, Middle East Airlines has continued to fly as officials tighten security to deter Israeli attacks.
AFP footage of the October 20 explosion aftermath shows no planes moving on the runway in front of the blast.
AFP has debunked other claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.
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