Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was declared killed on September 27 in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, Lebanon.
Against this context, an image of people gathering on an open street is being widely shared as showing celebrations for the death of Nasrallah in Beirut.
A social media user shared the image and wrote, “NBC: Popular celebrations in the streets of Beirut after news of the killing of Hassan Nasrallah.!”
SouthCheck found that the claim was false. The image shows people gathering around the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted a Hamas office.
On doing a Google reverse image search, we found the same image published on the website Foreign Policy on January 2, 2024. The caption read: “People gather at the site of an alleged Israeli strike targeting a Hamas office in Beirut on Jan. 2 (Credit) AFP”.
We also found the image on a website which stated that the image shows an Israeli drone attack on a Hamas office on January 2, 2024, in Southern Beirut that killed Saleh al-Arouri, a leader of Hamas.
Associated Press also published a video of the aftermath of the attack.
We compared the viral image with a screenshot of the AP video and found them to be the same. The blue hoarding at the bottom with the text ‘Pharma-C’ written in white is present in both images.
The incident was also reported by Reuters. The news report had shots of the same building seen in other reports.
Hence, we can ascertain that the viral image is old and unrelated to Nasrallah’s death.
