Reported claim: video-game clips and an AI-generated video are circulating as real footage of strikes on Israel and Iran

A recurring pattern of fabricated and recycled war footage has circulated on social media during the current period of tension between Israel and Iran, and it is worth documenting as a pattern rather than as a single incident, because the same techniques keep reappearing.

The first component is video-game footage relabeled as real combat video. Clips recorded in the military simulation games ARMA 3 and War Thunder have circulated on TikTok and elsewhere captioned as if they showed real strikes, to the point that the Israeli military itself has had to publicly clarify that specific viral clips were fake. Reporting on the pattern has linked at least some of the distribution of this footage to networks associated with Russian influence operations, rather than treating it as purely organic misinformation.

The second component is AI-generated video. A synthetic video claiming to show an Iranian strike on Israeli military headquarters was assessed by detection researchers as approximately 93 percent likely to be AI-generated, based on physical inconsistencies in the footage and a building that does not match the real structure it claimed to depict. This is a case where the underlying claim is not simply exaggerated or missing context — the visual evidence itself does not depict a real event.

The third component is recycled footage from earlier, unrelated conflicts, relabeled with new captions claiming to show current Lebanon strikes. This is one of the oldest disinformation techniques, and it remains effective specifically because a viewer has no easy way to verify a clip's true origin without a reverse-image or reverse-video search.

What unites these three techniques is not necessarily central coordination — game footage passed off as real war video is a recurring problem across many conflicts, and this desk is not asserting a single coordinated campaign behind all of it. What can be said is that verified instances exist of each technique being used in this information environment, and that at least part of the game-footage distribution has been linked by researchers to Russian-associated influence networks.

What a reader can do: treat any dramatic, uncaptioned strike video with default skepticism until it is confirmed by a named military source or a reputable wire service; check whether the same clip appears attached to a different, older conflict elsewhere online; and know that AI-detection tools, while imperfect, exist and are increasingly used by fact-checking organizations to flag synthetic video before it is amplified further.