Accounts on social media circulated a report stating that the Israeli army had struck 48 sites across Syrian territory, following a flypast by two Russian aircraft in Syrian airspace, and attached to the report a set of images their publishers claimed documented these strikes.
The fact-checking team traced the claim digitally using keyword searches and reviewed official and local sources, and found the claim to be untrue, and that the Israeli raids were limited to 8 strikes targeting Abu al-Duhur military airport in the Idlib countryside, with nothing to establish that 48 strikes had been carried out across Syrian territory.
Through a reverse image search using Google Lens, and by tracing the original publication context of the attached images and comparing them with the details given in the claim, it emerged that the images are old and belong to different events. One image relates to the Iraqi Ministry of Finance building on 19 August 2009, another documents the American strikes on Shayrat military airport on 7 April 2017, while the third relates to an Israeli bombardment targeting Mezzeh military airport on 17 December 2024.
Why is this claim misleading?
Out of temporal context: The claim exaggerated the scale of the Israeli strikes and attached old images belonging to different events and incidents, in order to suggest that the strikes extended across all Syrian territory.
