Old Video of an Airstrike in Gaza Shared as Kabul Airport Blast
The video is from an airstrike in Gaza and doesn't show the blast near the Kabul airport.
The video claims to shows visuals from from the blasts in Kabul, Afghanistan.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
A 14-second video of a blast is being circulated on social media with a claim that it is the footage from the twin blast that hit near the Kabul airport and claimed the lives of at least 60 afghans and 13 US troops on Thursday, 26 August.
However, we could trace the video back to 21 August and as per the reports, the video shows an airstrike by an Israeli warplane in the Gaza Strip.
CLAIM
Soon after news of the blasts broke, multiple users started sharing the video as "footage from the blast in Kabul".
A Twitter user 'Ravindra Singh' whose bio mentions that he is a journalist with News18, too, shared the video, which had been viewed over 62,000 times at the time of writing this story.
An archived version of the tweet can be found here.
News organisations such as OdishaTV.in, India.com also used a picture collage from the same video in their news stories. The image was credited to news agency IANS.
Several social media users have shared the video along with similar claims and the archived versions can be seen here, here, and here.
WHAT WE FOUND
We fragmented the video into multiple keyframes using the InVID Google Chrome extension and followed it up with a reverse image search.
We then came across a news article on Al Jazeera published on 23 August 2021. The article carried a screenshot from the same video and mentioned that it was from an Israeli airstrike that happened in Gaza.
Screenshot of the article on Al Jazeera.
We also came across a tweet by Al Jazeera which carried a longer version of the now viral video. The tweet was posted on 22 August
Here's a comparison to show the similarities between the two visuals.
Viral video screenshot (L), Screenshot from Al Jazeera (R).
We found several other news reports about the incident which carried the same visuals.
A Times of Israel report read that the IDF said that it had launched airstrikes to hit four Hamas weapons storage sites in the Gaza Strip on 21 August. This was in response to shooting at the forces at the border, in which one soldier was critically wounded.
Screengrab from the Times of Israel.
Clearly, a video from Gaza is being circulated as scene of blasts from Kabul airport.
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