Does a video on TikTok show an Israeli warship being struck by an explosive device during the Hamas-Israel conflict in the fall of 2023? No, that's not true: The video, from 2015, captures a fire prevention drill at a chemical plant in the Tongzhou district of Beijing.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok by @halabi77 on November 5, 2023. The caption (translated from Arabic to English by Lead Stories staff) read:
An Israeli warship was targeted
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Sun Nov 12 10:41:09 2023 UTC)
The claim on TikTok was widely shared following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, such as here.
Lead Stories conducted a reverse image search (archived here) using TinEye that revealed a version of the video was published on MeiPai, a photo and video-sharing app in China, on November 16, 2015. The Chinese title, translated into English by Google, read: "A video of a fire circulating on the Internet was shot at close range. I hope everyone will pay more attention to fire prevention after seeing it."
(Source: MeiPai screenshot taken on Sun Nov 12 11:54:55 2023 UTC)
Two additional versions of the video appear on YouTube. On November 18, 2015, @ahmedtreiban6713 uploaded the video on YouTube with the title "Chinese chemical plant explosion..." Additionally, on June 11, 2017, @funfsinn14 published the video on YouTube under the title "Puyang, Henan, China Chemical Fire and Explosion."
An article published on November 13, 2015, by Oriental Daily News, a Chinese-language newspaper and news website in Hong Kong, reported (translated by Google Translate) that the drill took place at a chemical factory in the Tongzhou district of Beijing, where fire and environmental protection units conducted a joint exercise to simulate a fire and leak of dangerous chemicals.
(Source: hk.on.cc screenshot taken on Sun Nov 12 13:04:03 2023 UTC)
