Fact check: No, Iran did not strike a secret US Gulf base

With President Trump declaring that the ceasefire is "over" after fresh strikes by Iran, a video goes viral on social media allegedly depicting an attack on a US facility by Iran. The video shows something different.

With US President Donald Trump declaring the ceasefire "over," the Iran war is back in focus. On Wednesday, social media users began circulating videos purporting to show new attacks by Iran.

At least one of those videos has nothing to do with the conflict.   

Video goes viral again with false claims  

Claim: The user posting this video on X, viewed over 288.000 times at the time of writing, claims that it shows a "highly classified" US facility ablaze after a retaliatory strike by Iran. 

DW Fact check: False 

The video appeared several times on X (such as here) Wednesday with the same claim, collecting thousands of views.  

But the video shows a fire in a market in St. Petersburg, Russia, in December. 

We see large plumes rising from a burning building as firefighters and other people gather in front. The surrounding area includes streets filled with cars and high-rise buildings. 

A reverse image search shows that the video previously circulated in May, also falsely portraying the Iran war.  

The same video has been shared with false claims that it depicts various other scenarios, including an attack by Iran on Dubai and a US attack on Kuwait.

The video previously went viral on the same X account, claiming that it showed a Hezbollah attack on a secret base in Israel.  

It was posted with false claims across social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, for example) and in several languages (including Arabic, Turkish, Indonesian and Spanish). 

The reverse image search also leads to posts (such as here) claiming that the video shows a fire that broke out in St. Petersburg on December 10.  

Visual cues such as the round-shaped structure over the entrance or the triangular shapes under the main roof, overlap with videos (here and here) taken from different perspectives of the same incident in December.  

We can thus geolocate the video as showing the Pravoberezkny Market in St. Petersburg (59.904505, 30.469624).  

Edited by: M Gagnon