Footage of an Israeli airstrike on a building in Gaza has been shared in Chinese-language social media posts that falsely claimed it showed the Japanese embassy in the coastal Israeli city of Tel Aviv being “bombed”. There have been no official reports of the Japanese embassy in Israel being attacked, and similar clips of the Gaza high-rise being destroyed in an Israeli air raid have circulated since May 2021.
“The Embassy of Japan in Israel bombed,” read simplified-Chinese sticker text on a TikTok video shared on August 20, 2024.
The 15-second clip shows an explosion and the collapse of a tower block.
The same footage was also shared repeatedly on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok.
China and Japan are perennial rivals in East Asia whose ties are freighted with the baggage of Japan’s imperial past and China’s more recent rise to superpower status (archived link).
The claim also surfaced 10 months into the war in Gaza (archived link).
The unprecedented Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 that sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,431 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has acknowledged the figures as reliable.
But the video circulating online does not show the Japanese embassy and there have been no official reports of an attack on the embassy.
Israeli airstrikes
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the video and subsequent keyword searches led to a similar video of the same building published by Al Jazeera on May 13, 2021 (archived link).
When compared to the Al Jazeera footage, the falsely shared video appears to have been flipped horizontally.
The Al Jazeera video is titled “Israel destroys third Gaza tower” and its caption states it shows “the moment the 14-storey al-Shorouq tower, housing media offices in Gaza City, was completely destroyed by multiple Israeli air raids” on May 12, 2021.
According to Human Rights Watch, the building — among the oldest tower blocks in Gaza and a landmark in the city — was one of four high-rises destroyed in Israeli air strikes between May 10 and May 21 when a ceasefire came into force (archived link).
Within those 11 days, Israeli air strikes killed 243 people including 66 children in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The Israeli army said more than 4,300 rockets were fired towards the Jewish state by Hamas and Islamic Jihad (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (left) and the one published by Al Jazeera (right), with similarities highlighted by AFP:
The Embassy of Japan in Israel is located in the Museum Tower in Tel Aviv (archived links here and here).
Google Street View imagery shows a building with a mainly glass facade, different from the one seen in the falsely shared video.
AFP has debunked other false claims around the Israel-Gaza war here.
