Amid the June 2025 Iran-Israel conflict, a video (here, here, and here) purportedly showing an Israeli politician sprinting during an interview is going viral. It is being claimed that he ran away to escape an Iranian missile strike. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The video shows an Israeli minister running away mid-interview as Iranian missiles hit during the June 2025 Iran-Israel conflict.
Fact: The footage is from October 2023 and shows Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, and a few others escaping a Hamas attack in Israel’s Sderot. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the claim, we performed a reverse image search using keyframes from the viral video, which led us to a Facebook post dated 18 October 2023, which contained an uncropped version of the viral video. This confirms that the footage predates the June 2025 Iran-Israel conflict.
During this search, we found a couple of CBN news reports from 16 October 2023 containing the visuals from the viral video (here and here). These reports were on a fact-finding tour led by Israeli UN ambassador and then-Knesset (Israeli parliament) member Danny Danon in Sderot on 15 October 2023.
During that visit, sirens regarding an attack by Hamas went off, and Danon, along with journalists and diplomats, ran for shelter—as seen in the viral video. The clip appears at around the 46-second mark in CBN’s video report published on YouTube on 16 October 2023.
Additional coverage from The Times of Israel dated 16 October 2023 mentions the presence of Elad Kalimi, deputy mayor of Sderot, during this incident. This article contained an ‘X’ post from 15 October 2023 made by a person named Joel C.Rosenberg, describing the event. YENİ ŞAFAK, a Turkish media outlet, also posted this video on Instagram on 16 October 2023.
To sum up, an old video from October 2023, showing the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Denon, and a few others, escaping a Hamas attack, is being falsely shared as footage of an Israeli minister escaping an Iranian missile strike in June 2025.
