A video (here, here and here) showing camels being swept away in floodwaters is currently circulating on various social media platforms. The viral video is associated with claims that this incident occurred in the desert of Dubai, the Dubai floods in 2024. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The video shows camels getting washed away in the 2024 Dubai floods.
Fact: The footage is from the flash floods in Saudi Arabia in the year 2018. These visuals are not related to the 2024 Dubai floods. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a reverse image search on a few keyframes from the viral video, this led us to a news report (here) featuring the same visuals as in the video. The YouTube channel ‘Northeast Live’ published this video on 15 November 2018, with the title, ‘Flash floods claim 30 lives in Saudi Arabia’.
We also found a video (archive) uploaded by a Facebook user in October 2018, which contained similar visuals of camels getting swept away in flood waters shot from a different angle. You can find a comparison of a few frames from the viral video and this video in the following collage.
Further search led us to various news articles (here, here and here ) reporting the 2018 flash floods that hit Saudi Arabia.
Additionally, using a time filter on Google, we checked on the web to see if Dubai had witnessed any floods during this period, which is in October-November 2018, and found a few articles(here and here) reporting such floods in November 2018, but none of them had visuals similar to the viral video. Hence, it’s apparent that this video is not from Dubai but from Saudi Arabia in 2018.
Furthermore, similar visuals of the same incident were shared by various (here and here) social media users back in 2018. These posts also asserted that the video was from the 2018 flash floods in Saudi Arabia.
To sum up, the viral video displaying camels being washed away by flood waters is from Saudi Arabia in 2018, not from the Dubai floods in 2024.
