Videos don’t show airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader

Hezbollah confirmed Sept. 28 that its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed a day earlier in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon.

Israel conducted the strike Sept. 27 at Hezbollah’s central headquarters under residential buildings in Dahiya, a Beirut suburb. 

An X video compilation posted Sept. 28 that had amassed more than 1.8 million views as of Sept. 29 shows clips of 17 buildings being hit by bombs and claimed to show the moment the airstrike that killed Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders landed.

“VIEWER DISCRETION: Moments of arrival for all the bunker-busting bombs that ended the lives of Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s leadership in their fortified underground bases,” the post said. 

We found other social media posts sharing the video and claiming it was of the airstrike that killed Nasrallah, or saying the footage was filmed in Lebanon. 

The compilation’s first clip, shared on X, shows men and boys standing on a street corner looking at a building in the background that suddenly went up in flames after an airstrike. The video also shows multiple buildings struck by bombs.

But the claim that this was the moment Nasrallah was killed doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.

First, all of the X post’s footage was shot in daylight. The Sept. 27 airstrike on Hezbollah’s headquarters happened at night. Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari said in a video shared Sept. 28 that the strike took place “last night.” News photos of the aftermath of the bombing show that the airstrike happened at night.

Second, a reverse-image search of several of the clips shows they are from airstrikes in Gaza.

(X screenshot)

We found the first clip in the video had been shared Aug. 18 by the Anadolu Agency, a Turkish state-run news agency, on its English-language X account.

The Anadolu X post said the footage captured the “moment of Israeli army’s attack on Zagout family’s home in Nuseirat Camp” in Gaza. The post linked to an Anadolu article about Israeli attacks in August that killed 16 people, including at the Nuseirat refugee camp. 

We also found the same footage shared Aug. 18 on X on two other accounts that described it as being from Gaza.

The X video that claims it shows the strike on Nasralla also contains other footage of Gaza airstrikes, including:

• A man and a child run as a building behind them is hit by a bomb, shared Aug. 17 on Facebook and labeled as being in Gaza.

• A group of men running next to a white car and piles of rubble as a building explodes behind them, shared Aug. 11 on Instagram, where it was described as a scene from Gaza.

• One clip had text describing it as from a building in the Bureij camp, dated June 3. That matches with video we found on X showing the same building in central Gaza being struck the same day.

• A different video clip of a residential building being destroyed was shared on social media in December.

• A video of a residential building was shared on Instagram in February with a caption saying it was from Gaza.

• We found the video of a man standing in front of a white building and then running as it explodes in July X post and in a fact-check by India-based fact-checking organization Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Centre, which said this clip and others shared in the compilation are from Gaza, not Lebanon.

• Another bombing of a residential building was shared Aug. 27 on X with a caption saying it was from the Nuseirat camp in Gaza.

Our ruling

An X post containing 17 video clips claimed to show the “moments” that Israel’s “bunker-busting bombs” arrived and “ended the lives of Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s leadership.”

Israel said and news photos show that the strikes that killed the Hezbollah leader happened at night; all the footage in the X post was shot in daylight. We found eight of the clips elsewhere on social media and they were taken in June, July and August in Gaza.

We rate the claim False.