A social media post (here, here, and here) featuring a graphic in which a group of people holding Israeli flags walking on the Indian flag is doing the rounds on social media. It is being claimed that Israelis have done this recently to India’s National flag. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Photo of Israelis walking on the Indian National Flag and desecrating it.
Fact: This is a digitally generated image. There are no news reports of any such incident of Israelis desecrating the Indian flag. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a reverse image search. This search did not yield any news reports about such an incident. In the past, when such incidents of people ‘desecrating the Indian flag’ have taken place, mainstream media has reported that (here, here, and here).
However, that is not the case here; we did not find even a single news report on the alleged incident of Israelis walking on the Indian flag that is being shown in the viral photo.
While looking at the image, we observed several inconsistencies and anomalies. The faces of the people featured in it look abnormal. Some people have long fingers. A person’s arms look missing.
The Israeli flags these people are holding seem like they are hovering in the air instead of the people holding the stick. The left leg of a person walking looks abnormally away from his torso. All these anomalies are commonly observed (here, here, here, and here) in images generated using Artificial intelligence tools.
Additionally, we found this image being shared by Bangladeshi Facebook users who shared this along with other images that look like digitally altered images. One of these images is an ai-generated one. This makes it clear the viral video is a digitally generated image and does not depict a real incident where Israelis walked on an Indian flag.
To sum up, a digitally generated image is falsely being shared as visuals of Israelis stomping the Indian flag.
