A video showing an airplane rammed into the side of a building has been circulating widely on social media. While social media users are claiming that the video shows a plane that crashed in Tel Aviv after an Iranian attack, its origin remains unknown and its authenticity highly questionable.
A video that has gone viral on X is said to show a plane crash in Tel Aviv, Israel, after an attack carried out by Iran. The footage, which has garnered more than five million views, was published on August 26 by a fake account pretending to belong to Donald Trump Jr. It is not, however, the official account of US President Donald Trump’s son.
The video shows a plane crashed into the side of a building. The person filming the scene speaks in Russian, saying: “Just now, a plane crashed into a building. Look, it’s stuck there. It’s a huge passenger jet; the windows shattered. My god, this is really happening. I don’t know how long it will hold.”
According to the posts featuring the video, the footage was filmed in Tel Aviv and shows the aftermath of an Iranian attack. However, there is no proof that such an attack actually took place.
**No sign of a crash in Tel Aviv **
It turns out, this video was already posted online back in March 2026 by the pro-Iranian account Asif Ali. This is the first clue that the video might not be authentic. When we carried out an online search using the keywords “plane crash Tel Aviv”, we couldn’t find a single article about the type of crash shown in the video. No reliable media outlets reported on this crash in August 2026 or when the video was first posted online back in March 2026. When we ran a screengrab of the footage through a reverse image search (check out our handy guide here), we saw that the video hadn’t been shared by any reliable media outlets.
The official X accounts run by the Israeli authorities as well as the city of Tel Aviv also didn’t share anything about a plane crash like the one shown in this footage at any point in 2026 or in previous years.
**A video likely generated by AI **
The exact origin of this video is difficult to establish. It was also shared back in April 2026 with the same description, but, once again, no trustworthy source was able to confirm its origin.
There are several visual and sonic clues that the video was generated by artificial intelligence.
First of all, there is a crowd of observers gathered in an extremely questionable security area, which seems to have been marked by the authorities using yellow tape. It is directly below part of the plane that seems like it could collapse at any minute and doesn’t align with the security measures usually taken when this type of accident occurs.
Next, if you compare this fire truck to the vehicles used by fire services in Tel Aviv, it is quite different. It doesn’t have the yellow stripes you usually see on fire trucks in Tel Aviv.
Finally, there are no logos or any other distinctive elements on the plane that would help us determine what company it belongs to. This clue, along with the others we identified, suggests that the video was created by artificial intelligence.
When we ran the video through Hiya, a tool for detecting audio produced by AI, it concluded that it was 99% likely that the video’s sound was generated by artificial intelligence.
The latest strikes against Israel were reported on June 7, 2026, when several Iranian missiles were fired towards Israel for the first time since the ceasefire. There is no proof of a link between the video and a new strike on Tel Aviv.
This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.
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