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| - The Israeli military posted the footage in June 2025, meaning that posts claiming the video was from March 2026 were misleading. It's unclear precisely what is depicted in the footage, which some users said showed decoy drawings of Iranian aircraft.
As the U.S. and Israel continued their military campaign on Iran in early March 2026, a video purportedly showing U.S. strikes on an aircraft in Tehran spread online, with many users claiming the F-14 bomber in the video was a decoy drawing instead of a real jet.
The video spread across multiple platforms, including Facebook and YouTube. One video on X (archived) with more than 10 million views had a caption reading:
The US has been bombing drawings of F-14s this entire time lol. The Iranians put their jets underground before the war began. Trump thought he destroyed the entire Iranian air force. It's a literally drawing. I can't believe it.
(X user @cirnosad)
However, the video was misleading — the Israeli military originally posted the footage months earlier, during its June 2025 conflict with Iran. Therefore we've rated the claim that the video showed U.S. strikes in March 2026 as miscaptioned.
On June 16, 2025, the Israeli military posted the video on X (archived), captioned:
RECAP of Our Recent Operations Over Tehran:
Strike on two F-14 fighter jets that were located at an airport in Tehran. These jets were intended to intercept Israeli aircraft.
Thwarted a UAV launch attempt toward Israel.
Eliminated a launch cell minutes before launch toward Israel after intelligence tracked and identified its launch team deploying UAV launchers and weapons.
In March 2026, many X users asked Grok, X's artificial intelligence chatbot, whether the footage actually depicted strikes on a decoy drawing of an aircraft. Thousands of users liked Grok's response, in which it said (archived) the video showed "US/Israeli strikes on painted 2D decoy F-14 silhouettes (static mock-ups) at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport—not real jets."
We were unable to determine, as of this writing, whether the jets were actually decoy drawings.
According to Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, who gave a news conference alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on March 5, 2026, the U.S. had struck nearly 200 targets in Iran over the course of 72 hours.
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