X Users Pass Off 2015 China Firefighting Exercise as Hezbollah Strike on Israel

The Lebanon-based Shiite militant group Hezbollah has vowed to “hit the enemy where it hurts” after Israel launched a series of airstrikes in southern Lebanon on February 14 in response to a rocket attack on northern Israel.

Hezbollah has been engaged in daily cross-border clashes with Israeli forces since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on October 7, 2023.

But the rocket attack on the northern Israeli town of Safed, which killed one person and wounded at least eight others, followed by retaliatory Israeli strikes in Lebanon that killed at least 10, have sparked fears that the simmering tensions could spill over into all-out war.

Social media users with apparent sympathies to Hezbollah recently circulated an old video that they falsely claimed shows a successful strike by the militant group on Israel.

On February 8, Qawemisrael, an X user identifying as a “media & news company,” posted a video showing a massive explosion at a facility, and commented:

“#Hezbollah Hits Israeli Base By Guided Missiles And Causes Comlete [SIC] Destruction.”

After the February 14 Israel-Hezbollah strikes and counterstrikes, other X users shared the same video, often with the exact same comment or a variation of the comment posted by Qawemisrael, including the misspelling of “complete.”

However, the video is actually from 2015, and shows a firefighting drill in China. In recent years, the same footage has repeatedly been misattributed to various locations, inside and outside of China. The accompanying descriptions, as in the Youtube video below, are also inaccurate.

In February 2017, the video was repeatedly linked to a fire in Tuas, Singapore, which reportedly involved chemical waste and flammable materials.

But Agence France-Presse fact checkers found that the video actually shows firefighters holding an exercise in Sichuan, China, and was posted by the Sichuan Public Security Fire Brigade to the Chinese social media platform Weibo on November 13, 2015.

In November 2015, the UK Mirror tabloid correctly identified the video as coming from China, but falsely claimed it showed a fire and explosion at a factory in Zhejiang province.

The same footage has been falsely linked to an October 2016 explosion at a BASF chemical complex in Ludwigshafen, Germany; a February 2017 explosion at French utility EDF’s Flamanville nuclear plant; and the Natanz nuclear site in Iran.

As Polygraph.info previously reported, social media networks have been flooded with recycled footage to support false, misleading or otherwise unsubstantiated narratives about the Israel-Hamas war since hostilities erupted.

Polygraph.info has documented many such cases, including multiple attempts to pass off footage and images from the war in Syria, an Indian navy missile test, militant activity in the Philippines, Azerbaijan detaining Karabakh leaders in a disputed territory, and other repurposed footage, as coming from the Israel-Hamas conflict.

In a January report, the European Fact-Checking Standards Network Project, a consortium of fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT) organizations across Europe, said that X, formally known as Twitter, ranked “worst” in its efforts to fight disinformation.

That report said not a single fact-checking organization surveyed considers X “to take disinformation seriously.”

“The only initiative in place to address disinformation seems to be Community Notes,” the report said.

“This community-driven model does not include any professional or methodological review and, by assigning more weight to users who are more ‘diligent about vetting details of notes,’ is open to manipulation and has been exploited to even display debunked disinformation in the notes themselves.”

X has since tagged some, but not all of the videos misattributing the Sichuan firefighting exercise to Hezbollah, with a message and hyperlink reading: “Stay informed. This media is presented out of context. Find out more.”

The hyperlink outlines X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy, while no further context for the footage posted is included.

As Polygraph.info has noted with previous examples of recycled footage being misrepresented on the platform, X says that, under its policy, it can remove “media that is shared in a deceptive manner or with false context” which can result in “widespread confusion on public issues, impact public safety, or cause serious harm.”

However, as in similar cases, the numerous posts falsely depicting the Sichuan firefighting exercise as a Hezbollah strike on Israel have not been taken down, even though the footage was posted in a deceptive manner, and with false context.