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AN IMAGE THAT purports to show missiles landing on a city, with a caption claiming it is Tel Aviv in Israel, is fake and was made using artificial intelligence.
The image has been shared multiple times across social media platforms. Including multiple posts on Facebook, where it has received thousands of reactions and where it has been shared hundreds of times.
It shows a skyline of a city at night, lit up in orange with what appear to be missiles raining down on buildings. Smoke rises in the distance. In the Facebook posts, the image is captioned: “This is not AI. This is Tel Aviv.”
The posts were shared on 17 and 18 June, in the middle of Israel’s war with Iran. Iran fired multiple rounds of ballistic missiles at Israel, some of which breached the country’s Iron Dome defence system.
Israel also fired missiles at Iran, who said that over 600 Iranians were killed in Israeli attacks, while the IDF said that 28 people in Israel were killed in Iranian attacks.
However, the image in question is fake and was created using artificial intelligence.
The image was not shared by any reputable news outlets during the Israel-Iran war, and only appeared on social media.
The image in question bears some hallmarks of AI generation — the smoke trails from the missiles are too uniform, looking highly stylised.
As well as this, misinformation researchers were quick to point out that the image is not real and that it was generated by AI.
Researcher Tal Hagin pointed out on social media platform X that the image was created by Mhamad Yusif on 13 June, and that an original uncropped version of the image shows the creator’s watermark at the bottom.
This IS AI.
— Tal Hagin (@talhagin) June 18, 2025
This AI image was created by Mhamad Yusif, an AI Creator on June 13th, 2025.
If you look closely, you can even see his watermark still visible in the image: https://t.co/lo4UZnyigz pic.twitter.com/JHlwFUmc2z
Users also tracked down the earliest available version of the image online, which came from Mhamad Yusif’s Facebook page, where it also contains the watermark.
In the comments below that original post, Yusif included what appears to be the prompt used for an artificial intelligence bot to generate the image:
“A highly detailed cinematic wide shot of glowing fiery trails falling from the sky over a modern city at night. The light trails resemble meteor showers or celestial phenomena, illuminating the cloudy sky in hues of orange and red. Below, the cityscape shows buildings with lights on, some faint smoke rising between them, adding a sense of tension and mystery. The style is ultra-realistic with dramatic lighting and a moody atmosphere, resembling a scene from a high-budget disaster or sci-fi movie.”
It is clear from the above evidence that the image in question was created using AI.
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