Several old and unrelated visuals of damaged traffic lights and bananas falling to the ground are being falsely shared on social media as scenes from the ongoing heatwave in Europe.
Temperatures climbed to 40°C in several parts of Europe on June 28 as storms swept across other regions, while France reported 1,000 excess deaths linked to the record breaking heatwave affecting the subcontinent.
The Claim:
The visuals were shared by Times Now in an Instagram post on June 29, with a caption claiming they showed the impact of the heatwave.
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What We Found:
1) Damaged traffic signal visuals are from unrelated Incidents in Italy, Germany
We ran a reverse image search on the first visual shows the front side of a damaged traffic light. The search results showed that the incident is from Verona, Italy.
Italian local news outlet Il Baco da Set reported on June 23, 2026, that a car caught fire while stopped at a red light at the intersection, damaging the traffic signal seen in the video.
We then ran a reverse image search on the second visual, which shows a side angle of a damaged traffic light. The results showed that the incident is from Berlin, Germany.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reported that the traffic signal seen in the video is in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district. It was damaged in June 2025 after a fire destroyed the techno club Wilde Renate.
We also found German news reports on the incident in which the same buildings seen in the background are visible.
2) Bananas melting and falling outside a shop is from 2025
We broke the video into key-frames and ran a reverse image using Google Lens which search results showed that the video pre-dates the ongoing heatwave in Europe.
We found a Facebook post from May 2025 with the same video. Additionally, using Google translate we were able to detect signsboards visible in the background written in simplified Chinese, indicating that the video is not from Europe.
