Theme: Saudi Arabia

A six-second clip presented as the moment a Houthi missile struck Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport circulated on social media from September 20, 2026, and it is generated by artificial intelligence, according to a fact check by Agence France-Presse published on September 22, 2026. A reverse image search led to a longer version of the video posted on March 19, 2026, by Yemeni politician Ali Hussein Al-Bujairi and labelled “manipulated media” by X itself; the fact check points to signs of synthetic origin, among them a man apparently walking through a glass door at the three-second mark and a mobile phone floating by another man’s ear at the eleven-second mark. There were no official reports of an attack on the airport: the Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted the missile, and the fire on September 19, 2026, consumed a Saudi Aramco fuel tank at a depot next to the terminal, according to The Jakarta Post and the BBC. A fact check by German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on September 17, 2026, identified another clip, nine seconds long and with more than 340,000 views, presented as strikes on Abha and also generated by artificial intelligence, along with a video of an ambush that is in fact April 2024 footage with commentary from a 2018 football match spliced in; in both cases, the detection platform Hive Moderation flagged the imagery as synthetic. The Deutsche Welle fact check notes that the difficulty of observing the conflict independently leaves room for this kind of content, and a Misbar verification on September 21, 2026, examined the same Riyadh airport video.