Lighthouse Journalism came across a video being widely shared on social media platforms. It was claimed along with the video that a missile launched at Israel returned to its source and blew up the launch pad. Similarly, another post claimed that a Hezbollah rocket misfired and reversed itself, taking out the launcher, the pad and 5 terrorists. During the investigation we found that the video is not recent, but from the Ukraine – Russia war.
Claim:
X user Jewish Patriot shared the viral video on his profile.
Check the archive version of the post here.
Other users too shared the video with similar Iran – Israel conflict claims.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by uploading the video in the InVid tool and then running a reverse image search on the keyframes obtained from the same.
This led us to a post on X, on June 25, 2022.
The caption stated: #WarheadToTheForehead – Russian Surface-to-Air Missile does a U-Turn – converts itself to a surface-to-surface missile mid-flight and its ‘owners’ into grease stains.
We found the video uploaded on the YouTube channel of news.com.au
The description said: Dramatic video has captured the moment a Russian surface-to-air missile system fires on itself in a bizarre malfunction.
The video was uploaded on June 24, 2022.
We also found a news report about this incident.
The report on dailymail mentioned the location of the incident too.
The report stated: The video was reported to be filmed in the early hours this morning near the town of Alchevsk, about 55 miles south of Severodonetsk, where the fiercest fighting has been raging. Reports indicate that the air defence missile system – possibly an S300 – was operated by Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists from the breakaway Luhansk People’s Republic.
Conclusion: Old video of malfunction of a Russian surface-to-air missile, where it took a U-turn and smashed into troops is going viral with claims of it being recent from the Iran – Israel conflict. Viral claims are misleading.
