Video of 2020 Beirut port explosion misrepresented as Huthi missile attack on Israel

AFP

09-05-2025

'Breaking: Huthi missile attack has reached Israeli city and caused destruction,' reads a post published on April 28, 2025, in Afaan Oromoo, one of Ethiopia's major languages.
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Screenshot of the false post, taken May 6, 2025
A 34-second clip shows a massive explosion in the middle of a city and plumes of smoke.
A YouTube link included in the post leads to an unrelated video speculating about preparations for war in northern Ethiopia.
'Reports show that a new war is starting in northern Ethiopia. The TPLF group is aligned with the Fano fighters and Eritrea to fight against the Ethiopian government,' says the narrator in the YouTube video.
TPLF is the Tigray People's Liberation Front, a paramilitary group that fought against the Ethiopian government before a peace deal was signed in South Africa in November 2022. Fano is a militia from the Amhara region, where it has been fighting against government forces since July 2023.
The narrator claims weapons are flowing to Tigray from war-torn Sudan while the Ethiopian government is recruiting new conscripts.
Photos of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and TPLF leaders are seen on the screen while the narrator speaks.
A similar post was shared here on Facebook.
Huthi attack
Yemen's Iran-backed Huthi rebel forces have launched missile and drone attacks against Israel since the war in Gaza broke out in October 2023 (archived here).
On April 27, 2025, The Times of Israel reported that the militant group fired a ballistic missile at Israel, which the Israeli military said was intercepted before reaching its territory (archived here).
A week later, though, one of the projectiles slipped through and struck inside the perimeter of Israel's main Ben Gurion Airport (archived here).
However, the video does not show an Israeli city destroyed by Huthi missiles.
Beirut blast
AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.
The search results indicated that the video was published on Instagram in December 2024 (archived here).
The description that accompanied the video indicates that it showed a massive Beirut explosion that occurred on August 4, 2020.
The video was also shared on Facebook and TikTok (archived here and here).
The massive chemical blast that devastated Beirut on August 4, 2020 killed more than 170 people and injured over 6,500. The explosion occurred in a warehouse in the port of Beirut and ravaged the capital, sparking unprecedented public outrage at the time (archived here).
AFP Fact Check matched features in the video to the location on Google Maps, including the church of Saint George Maronite Cathedral in Beirut (archived here).
Saint George Maronite Cathedral is about four kilometres from the port in Beirut.
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Comparison of screenshots from Google Maps (left) and the footage, taken on May 6, 2025
At the time, conspiracy theories about the blast were spread on social media, including the alleged depiction of the disaster as a missile attack (archived here).
There have been no news reports about the purported destruction of an Israeli city in the wake of a Huthi missile attack.
AFP Fact Check has previously debunked several claims related to the Beirut blast here, here and here.