A video showing a fighter jet being transported by a vehicle on ground is being shared on social media with the claim that it shows Israel evacuating their air bases near the Gaza Strip, following the recent offensive launched by Hamas against Israel.
BOOM found this claim to be false; our fact-check shows that the video predates the ongoing conflict, and has been circulated online since September 15, 2023.
Over 300 people in Israel, and 313 people in the Gaza Strip have been reported dead at the time of writing this article, after Palestinian extremist organisation Hamas launched one of the biggest military offensives against Israel on October 7, 2023. Following this social media has been flooded with unverified imagery being linked to the ongoing conflict.
Several X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook users then shared the viral video, with the caption, "Israeli Defense forces are now evacuating Air Bases near Gaza as thousands of terrorists flood into Israel. This situation is just escalating."
View the posts on X here, here and here.
View the posts on Facebook here, here and here.
Fact Check
BOOM ran a keyword search with "Israel evacuate fighter jets Gaza", but was unable to find any recent credible report on the ongoing conflict that mentioned any such evacuation efforts.
We then ran a reverse image search with keyframes from the video, and found a few posts on X, from September 15, 2023, that contained the same video.
The video was being shared (here, here and here) on the microblogging platform with the caption, "Two F-16 fighter jets transported by ground transport were spotted in southern Israel."
Taking cue from this, we ran a few keyword searches, but were unable to find any news report from September mentioning the transportation of the fighter jets.
The video also showed directional signs showing names of the towns "Ar'ara BaNegev and Arad", both located in the Southern District of Israel, indicating that the captions above have correctly identified the location of the footage as Southern Israel.
BOOM was unable to independently verify when the video was shot, and in what context. However, it predates the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas by over three weeks, and is thus unrelated to it.
