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Claim: Video shows an Israeli soldier pleading with Iran to stop attacks.
Verdict: False. The video is AI-generated. AI detection tools analysed the video and audio, and the results showed it is a deepfake.
Full Text
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched a major military operation called Operation Rising Lion against Iran, targeting dozens of sites, including Iran’s nuclear facilities, and eliminating top Iranian generals and nuclear scientists.
This came after several warnings against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, an allegation that Iran denied. Iran, however, launched retaliatory airstrikes on Israel. This development has led to a series of attacks by the two countries, causing further tension in the Middle East.
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With this ongoing war, a Facebook user posted a video showing an Israeli soldier pleading with Iran to stop the attacks. In the video, two injured soldiers were on the ground, with buildings destroyed and fire burning.
The transcript of the video reads, “Iran, we beg you, please stop the attacks, half of Israel is gone, we surrender, just stop this destruction.”
As of June 18, 2025, the video had garnered 24,000 likes, 1,600 comments, and 1,900,000 views.
After a closer look at the video, DUBAWA discovered that it originally came from a TikTok user.
As of June 18, 2025, the video on TikTok had gathered 2608 likes, 682 comments, and 1,751 shares.
This video has generated varying comments. A TikTok user, benrub23, who believed the video was real, wrote, “Don’t stop until the other half is gone”.
Another TikTok user, jay.williams4255, commented, “ You started it and Iran can’t hear you.”
kathyarmstrong313 also wrote, “I’m sorry for you all. This is so sad.”
However, some users doubted the video’s authenticity. A user, Mohammed.wali116, asked, “What’s the name of the AI app or site you used, please ?” and another user, maazim.yare86 wrote “Pure AI, but i.a it will happen soon.”
Given that the video appealed to several people, with some doubting its authenticity, DUBAWA decided to investigate it.
Verification
DUBAWA conducted a reverse image search of the video keyframes to find where the video had appeared. The results showed the video had become viral on several social media platforms.
However, a closer look at the bottom right corner of the video showed a watermark of Veo, Google’s new text-to-video AI model, which generates videos from text or image prompts.
So, DUBAWA subjected the video to hivemoderation.com, an AI-generated content detection tool, to verify its authenticity. The result revealed that the video is 99 per cent AI-generated, and the voice is 23 per cent not AI-generated. The aggregate score was 99.9 per cent AI-generated.
To further verify the video, we also subjected it to Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector to get feedback on the audio in the video. The tool assigned an authenticity score of 5/100, indicating that the sampled audio is likely a deepfake.
Also, there has been no official report at this time suggesting that Israeli soldiers are surrendering to Iran.
Conclusion
Findings by DUBAWA reveal that this video is AI-generated and should be ignored. The claim is, therefore, false.
This report was published under the Dubawa Kwame KariKari Factchecking and OSINT Fellowship.
