Is the photo showing a plane landing in Beirut during a rocket attack true?

In October 2024, a photograph of a plane landing at Beirut airport against the backdrop of flames from an explosion circulated online. We have verified whether this photo is genuine.

A photo of the plane began circulating on social media on October 21. The authors of the posts claimed that the photo was taken late on Sunday evening (that is, October 20) and showed a passenger airliner of the Lebanese airline MEA landing at Beirut International Airport right during Israeli airstrikes. The image appeared on the TV presenter’s Telegram channel Sergei Mardan (74,000 at the time of writing this analysis), as well as “Uncle Slava"(178,000), "Voblya • news"(135,000), "​​Notepad Russia 18+" (123,000),  "Sheikh Tamir" (120,000) and "Freshness"(104,000). The TV presenter also shared the photo Vladimir Solovyov (185,000 views), but he subsequently updated the post to clarify: “Is this graphics or a neural network.”

On Sunday, October 20, Israel will indeed caused several strikes on Beirut. One of them hit a facility located near the local airport. According to an Israel Defense Forces spokesman, the attack was aimed to branches of the Hezbollah-linked financial organization Al-Qard Al-Hasan.

AFP correspondent based in Beirut reportedthat at the time of the attack the airport continued to accept passenger flights (this is confirmed by service data Flightradar24), however, the footage taken by the news agency that evening does not at all resemble the viral image.

Fact checkers of the Misbar project also turned Please note that the aircraft livery in the photo does not correspond to that applied to MEA airline aircraft.

Among the examples of posts containing a viral image found using Google's reverse image search, Verified identified two of the earliest. They appeared on Instagram 6 minutes apart. - in profile Eyes Of Lebanon October 21 at 00:36 Moscow time and immediately at four accounts (Palestine Pixel, Eye on Palestine 2, South Lebanon and on the blog of designer Hussein Almadi) at 00:42. Both posts explicitly state that the image was generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and is intended to explain the situation in Beirut. Agency fact checkers dpa contacted the owner of the Eyes Of Lebanon account - he confirmed that the picture was created using AI, but clarified that he was not its author. “Verified” also contacted Almadi for comment, but at the time of publication of the analysis did not receive a response.

Services that identify content that is generated using AI have a high degree of confidence in confirming Eyes Of Lebanon's claim. In particular, Sightengine estimated the probability that the image was created by neural networks at 84%, Trumedia - in 91%, and Hive - in 96.1%.

Thus, the viral photo does not show the plane landing in Beirut during the Israeli attack. Most likely, the picture was created using AI, as the authors of the first publications with this image directly stated.

Cover photo: viral posts on Telegram

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

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