Fact-Check: No, Israeli Ambassador Reuven Azar Didn’t ‘Lash Out’ at Indian Media

The video is a deepfake. There is no evidence of Azar making such a statement.

A deepfake of Israeli Ambassador Reuven Azar is being shared to falsely claim that he 'lashed out' at Indian media questions.

(Source: X/Altered by The Quint)

A video of Israeli ambassador to India, Reuven Azar, reportedly speaking to the press is being shared on social media.

The claim: The video is being shared to claim that Azar "lashed out at Indian media questions, allegedly saying,

"Why are you asking me about morals? Did you teach Iran these morals when supporters of Raza Pahlavi were getting tortured? Did you teach these morals to Pakistan when Imran Khan’s supporters were getting incarcerated? Where is Imran Khan? He’s languishing in jail. Israel stands against all sorts of oppressions. We will help all those who seek help from us. And I don’t need any lectures from the Indian media.”

An archived version of the post can be seen here.

(Source: Threads/Screenshot)

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here and here.)

But...?: The audio is AI-generated. There is no evidence of Azar making this statement.

How do we know?: We ran a reverse image search on the video, which led us to a video of the Israeli ambassador showing the same background, uploaded by news agency PTI on X.

• Responding to a question about the US and Iran agreeing to a ceasefire, he spoke about Israel "welcoming" the ceasefire.

• He also remarked on Israel's airstrike on Lebanon, saying that it was neither a violation, nor was it a part of the ceasefire. "We are defending ourselves in Lebanon because Hezbollah decided to attack us unilaterally and has been hitting communities in northern Israel with anti-tank missiles and rockets, so we had to take action..."

• We then ran a relevant keyword search to check whether Azar ever made statements criticising the Indian media, but did not find any relevant reports or videos matching the statement in question.

• This made us question whether the video was an AI-manipulated one.

• To check this, we ran the video through Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detection tool and Hiya's Deepfake Voice detector.

• Hive's tool gave the audio a 99.2 percent probability of it being AI-generated.

The audio is was made using AI.

(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)

• Similarly, Hiya's tool gave the audio an authenticity score of one out of 100, noting that the sampled voice was "likely a deepfake."

It got a very low authenticity score.

(Source: Hiya/Screenshot)

Conclusion: An AI-manipulated video is being shared to falsely claim that Israeli ambassador Reuven Azar criticised the Indian media's questions.

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