A short video clip showing an explosion at Evin Prison in Tehran during an Israeli bombing raid is fake. The attack did take place, but the video in question – which has been widely broadcast and shared – is a fragment of an older photo of the prison gate. The photo was presumably edited into a moving image using AI technology.
Broadcast worldwide but fake: video of explosion at Iran prison traced back to old photo
Rien Emmery
Published:
In short
News outlets around the world published images from a surveillance camera that allegedly captured the Israeli bombing of the notorious Evin Prison in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on 23 June.
However, an analysis by VRT’s fact-checking team shows that the images are fake: they are a fragment of a photo from January 2023, which has been edited into a video with an explosion added.
On Monday morning, 23 June, Israel announced that it had bombed several symbolic sites in Iran, including Evin Prison in the capital, Tehran.
The prison is notorious for the hundreds of dissidents and other political prisoners who are being held there. One of them is Ahmadreza Djalali, the Iranian-Swedish emergency doctor and visiting professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel who has been accused of espionage by the Iranian regime and sentenced to death.
Rien Emmery from our fact-checking team explains the process (in Dutch)
The most spectacular image of the attack was a 6-second black-and-white clip showing an explosion at the prison gate. The images appear to be from a surveillance camera. They were shared on social media by Iranian journalists such as Masoud Kazemi, and by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar.
The footage was also picked up by news media around the world. It was featured in reports by The New York Times, CNN in the US, the British public broadcaster BBC and VTM-Journaal.
There is no doubt that Evin Prison in Tehran is shown at the beginning of the video. The sign and the barred windows are clearly recognisable in other photos of the building.
Using TinEye, an image search engine, we performed a search using the opening image of the video. The result is a colour photograph of Evin Prison that bears a striking resemblance to the source material.
Further reverse image search queries reveal cropped versions of the same photo on various websites. One of them cites a Twitter profile as the source: @iaaraash.
On that profile, we indeed found the original photo of the gate of Evin Prison. The image appears to have been posted by Iranian citizen journalist Arash Hashemi more than two years ago, on 6 January 2023.
Image analysis showed that the first frame of the black-and-white footage apparently from the security camera fits perfectly into the larger colour photo from January 2023. You can see that first video image here in the red frame.
Further comparison also shows that the plants in the foreground of both images are identical.
Incidentally, this vegetation is another indication that the images of the explosion cannot be recent. The bare bushes correspond to the time when the photo was taken, in the winter month of January 2023, not to the situation in the summer month of June 2025.
An aerial photograph from June 2023, for example, shows how the bushes are normally in full leaf at this time of year.
Everything therefore points to the images in the video being fake. A section of an older, genuine photo of Evin Prison has been edited into a video with an explosion added.
This was probably done using an application based on AI. The phenomenon of adding explosions to images is quite common, to the extent that there are even specialised AI applications for it.
Although Evin Prison was indeed bombed on 23 June, these images are not authentic.
Conclusion
On Monday morning, 23 June, Israel bombed Evin Prison in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
A video appeared on social media showing surveillance camera footage of an explosion at the prison gate. Israeli government officials and Iranian media have shared the images, which have also been picked up by the world press.
However, the video is fake. A fragment of an older photo of Evin Prison, from January 2023, has been edited into a video showing an explosion. This was probably done using AI.
We therefore assess the viral video of the 23 June bombing of the prison to be false.
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