On 13 June 2025, Israel launched attacks on more than a dozen targets across Iran under the codename Operation Rising Lion, with the stated objective of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Israel reportedly damaged key nuclear facilities and military installations, killing several of Iran’s top military leaders. In retaliation, Iran launched a series of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel under the name Operation True Promise 3. In this context, a video (here, here, here and here) is going viral on social media, showing an aerial view of a plant catching fire, with claims that it shows an Iranian attack on an oil refinery in Haifa, Israel. Let’s find the truth behind this video.
Claim: The viral video showing a massive explosion at an industrial plant is from the recent Iranian missile strike on Israel’s Haifa oil refinery.
Fact: The video is not related to the recent Iran-Israel conflict. It has been online since at least 2015 and allegedly shows a chemical plant explosion in China. While international media confirmed that Iran targeted Haifa and Israel shut down refinery operations, the viral video predates the attack and is unrelated. Hence, the claim is FALSE.
To find the truth, we performed a reverse image search on Google, which led us to the same video uploaded on YouTube by a channel on 19 November 2015. The caption read “Chinese chemical plant explosion,” indicating that the video is old and unrelated to the recent events.
We also found the same video on another YouTube channel named The PK Media, uploaded on 27 March 2019, with the caption “China Blast 2019 | China Chemical Plant Explosion.”
Further research led us to several websites, including manufacturing.net and military.com, which also reported that the incident occurred in China. These reports used the same viral video and were published in 2015. While we could not independently verify the exact location or cause of the explosion, it is clear that the incident predates the recent Iran-Israel conflict.
Additionally, international media reported that Iran targeted Haifa and Tel Aviv with missile strikes, leading to the shutdown of Israel’s Haifa refinery facilities. However, the viral video has no connection to this incident (here and here).
To sum up, a 2015 video of a plant catching fire is falsely shared as footage of Iran’s recent attack on Israel’s Haifa refinery.
