Filipino netizens circulated on Facebook a video of an Israeli soldier supposedly surrendering to Iran and begging it to stop the attacks amid the ongoing conflict between the two countries. This is fake.
Published on June 16 and 17, the video shows a seemingly distressed Israeli soldier saying:
“Iran, we beg you. Please, stop the attacks. Half of Israel is gone. We surrender. Just stop this destruction.”
One of the posts captioned the video in Bisaya, which read:
“Kalooy. Surrender na intawon sila. (This is pitiful. They said they’re surrendering).”
A reverse-image search of clips from the video would reveal it is fake and generated using artificial intelligence.
There are no reports of an Israel surrender on the agenda. It was U.S. President Donald Trump who demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender” which was defiantly rejected by the country’s supreme leader.
Earlier versions of the video can be traced back to the YouTube channel “Our.thoughts” and TikTok user Jax Teller Motivation. Upon closer inspection of the full and clear video, a watermark of Google’s generative AI model Veo can be seen in its bottom right corner. This was cropped in some of the circulating posts.
VERA Files Fact Check ran the full video through the AI-detector tool Hive Moderation. The results indicate that it is 100% likely to be AI-generated.
The spurious posts surfaced amid the continuing exchange of missile strikes between Iran and Israel, which started on June 13 after the latter launched attacks on Iran’s nuclear and military structure.
Posted by various FB users, the video has so far amassed around 52,652 reactions, 5,057 comments and 14,193 shares.
