Footage of an Israeli airstrike on a building in Gaza has been shared in Chinese-language social media posts, falsely claiming that the Japanese embassy in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv was “bombed.” There have been no official reports that the Japanese embassy in Israel was attacked, and similar footage of the Gaza skyscraper being destroyed in an Israeli airstrike has been circulating since May 2021.
“The Japanese embassy in Israel has been bombed,” reads a sticker in simplified Chinese on a TikTok video shared on August 20, 2024.
The 15-second clip shows an explosion and the collapse of an apartment building.
The same images were also shared repeatedly on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
China and Japan aabout eternal rivals in East Asia, whose ties are laden with the baggage of Japan’s imperial past and China’s recent rise to superpower (archived link).
The claim also surfaced 10 months after the start of the war in Gaza (archived link).
Hamas’ unprecedented 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 official Israeli figures that also include hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,431 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory, which the United Nations has acknowledged as reliable.
But the Japanese embassy is not visible in the video circulating online, and there have been no official reports of an attack on the embassy.
Israeli airstrikes
A reverse search on Google using keyframes from the video and subsequent keyword searches produced a similar result video of the same building published by Al Jazeera on May 13, 2021 (archived link).
Compared to the Al Jazeera footage, the falsely shared video appears to be flipped horizontally.
The Al Jazeera video is titled “Israel destroys third tower in Gaza” and the caption states that it “shows the moment the 14-story al-Shorouq tower, which houses Gaza City’s media offices, was completely destroyed by multiple Israeli airstrikes” on May 12, 2021.
According to Human Rights Watch, the building, one of the oldest tower blocks in Gaza and a landmark in the city, was one of the four skyscrapers destroyed in Israeli airstrikes between May 10 and May 21, when a ceasefire came into effect (archived link).
Within those 11 days, Israeli airstrikes killed 243 people, including 66 children in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. The Israeli military said more than 4,300 rockets were fired at the Jewish state by Hamas and Islamic Jihad (archived link).
Below is a screenshot of the comparison between the falsely shared video (left) and the video published by Al Jazeera (right), with AFP highlighting similarities:
The Embassy of Japan in Israel is located in the Museum tower in Tel Aviv (archived links) here And here).
Google Streetview imagery shows a building with a mostly glass facade, unlike the one in the falsely shared video.
AFP has debunked other false claims about the Israel-Gaza war here.
