Claim: Footage shows Iran firing a salvo of Grad rockets at Israel.
Fact: The video is a decade old, and possibly shows a scene from the eastern Ukraine conflict in 2014. It has nothing to do with the recent retaliatory attacks by Iran on Israel.
On 15 April 2023, Threads user @nouman_mustafa7890 shared a video of Iran purportedly firing a volley of missiles on Israel, with the caption, “IranAttackIsrael 🔥🔥.”
Iran began its retaliatory attack on Israel on the night of 13 April, firing more than 300 drones and missiles. Israel and its allies, US, UK, and Jordan, intercepted “99% of projectiles,” making the attack unsuccessful.
Soon after, a deluge of misleading posts, claiming to show Iran’s attack, went viral on social media. Soch Fact Check has already debunked several of these posts here, here and here.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search of keyframes from the video on Google but the results were limited.
However, we found a seemingly relevant Telegram link for Casus Belli Lives channel, where the user posted a screenshot of a YouTube video that matches a scene from the video in question. The YouTube video, visible in the screenshot, was posted with a title in the Russian language caption in 2017.
When we conducted a reverse image search of the Telegram screen grab, the results led us to a YouTube video from seven years ago, with the following Russian title, “Ночной залп РСЗО “Град”. Огонь!!!” [translation: “Night volley of Russian MLRS “Grad”. Fire!!!”]. From the 0:30 mark onwards, the video shows the back angle of the rocket fire which matches the video in question.
Soch Fact Check also conducted a reverse image search of the keyframes on Yandex where the top search result was a video posted on RuTube, a Russian video platform. This footage is identical to the one posted on YouTube, where the viral clip can be seen starting from the 0:30 mark. However, the RuTube post dates back even further to 2014. According to its title, the footage shows a scene where the “The Ukrainian army shoots at the cities of Donbass from the GRADS.”
To investigate this further, Soch Fact Check took cues from the titles of both the videos, and conducted a search using the keywords “Grad” along with “Ukraine” and other variations. Firstly, we found that both the videos apparently show the Grad, a military truck-mounted rocket launcher developed in the 1960s, firing a volley of rockets. The missile system, shown in the video, fires a salvo of rockets, and is capable of firing as much as 2.5 tons of ammo in 20 seconds.
Most importantly, the keyword search revealed that this weaponry was reportedly used in 2014 in the eastern Ukraine conflict.
According to a 2014 report by The Human Rights Watch, Grad rockets, which are unguided and can potentially target civilians in densely populated areas, killed 16 civilians in the eastern Ukraine conflict in 2014.
The decades-old weaponry, with deadly but unpredictable results, was also used during the Ukraine-Russia war that began in February 2022. “It’s very long-range shelling, so sometimes we can’t see the result of our work because of the weather or fire in front of us,” said a Ukrainian soldier, in a report by The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “But I can tell you for sure over 60 enemy units were destroyed in February alone,” the soldier added, while describing the impact of the rockets in the current Ukraine-Russia war.
Similarly, according to a 2023 report by the BBC on Ukraine’s reliance on Grad rockets, the country, which could fire 40 rockets in one attempt in 2022, could now “only afford to fire a few at a time,” due to stretched war resources.
Therefore, Soch Fact Check concludes that a viral video on Threads, claiming to show Iran’s attack on Israel, is actually old.
Considering the earliest date the video can be traced back to and Ukraine’s reliance on Grad rockets over the years, the video seems to be linked to the eastern Ukraine conflict which took place in 2014.
Virality
The Threads post received 87 likes.
On X, the post generated at least 358,000 views.
Conclusion: A video posted on Threads does not show Iran firing Grad rockets at Israel. The video is old, and possibly linked to the conflict in eastern Ukraine when Grad rockets were used by Ukraine in 2014.
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Background image in cover photo: Sofiia Gatilova/REUTERS
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