The viral claim fails on its most foundational premise before a single frame of video is even examined. Operation Roaring Lion — known in Washington as Operation Epic Fury — was a joint Israeli-American offensive campaign that began on February 28, 2026, targeting Iran's missile launchers, military installations, air defense networks, and nuclear infrastructure. It was not an Iranian military operation; it was the operation Iran was on the receiving end of. The claim inverts the operational reality entirely, re-casting the aggressor as the victim and transforming a decisive Israeli-American strike into a catastrophic Iranian triumph. That inversion is not accidental — it is the core of the disinformation architecture the video was designed to construct.
The AI-Generated Video and Iran's Disinformation Campaign
Analysts at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies identified the specific genre of video circulating widely during the Iran-Israel conflict: AI-fabricated footage showing Iranian missiles striking Tel Aviv residential towers. One such video — showing a missile slowly arcing across the Tel Aviv skyline before a 13-story residential building instantaneously collapses — contained a Google Veo logo in the bottom left corner, the watermark of Google's AI video-generation platform. The trajectory physics were unnaturally slow, and the building collapse was instant and unrealistic — telltale signs of synthetic generation. Yet Press TV, the Iranian state-owned broadcaster run by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, posted the video on its X account as evidence of the regime's battlefield success.
The scale of Iran's AI disinformation operation was staggering. A fabricated post purporting to show the three iconic Azrieli Tower skyscrapers in Tel Aviv crumbling and smoldering received more than 40 million views. Another AI-generated video showing Ben Gurion International Airport reduced to rubble accumulated millions of additional views. These posts flooded X, Instagram, and TikTok simultaneously — a volume-based strategy specifically designed to overwhelm platforms' ability to label and remove synthetic content before it shapes public perception. Reverse-image searches of multiple fake videos revealed identical footage posted by hundreds of different accounts, the signature of a coordinated bot amplification network. The 27-million-view video referenced in the claim fits squarely within this documented, state-directed disinformation campaign.
What Iran's Missiles Actually Accomplished
Iran did launch retaliatory ballistic missile barrages at Israel during the wider conflict, including what Tehran branded "Operation True Promise III" in June 2025. Those attacks were real — but their outcome was the opposite of what the viral propaganda claimed. According to field reporting and analysis from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, approximately 90 percent of Iranian ballistic missiles launched at Israel were intercepted by Israel's multilayered air defense architecture: the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 exoatmospheric systems, David's Sling medium-range interceptors, Iron Dome, and US-operated Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries, supplemented by US Navy destroyers armed with SM-2, SM-3, and SM-6 interceptors in the eastern Mediterranean.
A limited number of missiles did penetrate defenses and caused significant structural damage in areas including central Tel Aviv, Rishon LeZion, Ramat Gan, Haifa, and Beer Yaakov — this is not disputed. However, casualties remained relatively few precisely because Israel's civil defense system functioned. An Israel Defense Forces Home Front Command officer who surveyed one Tel Aviv impact site noted: "The building you see behind me was almost completely destroyed, but thanks to civilians following the guidelines, there are relatively few injuries, all minor, considering the massive destruction." That statement — acknowledging property destruction while confirming the absence of mass casualties — encapsulates the actual outcome of Iran's strikes. It is the antithesis of a "devastating strike on Israel's largest city and its civilian population."
Iran's Disinformation Playbook: Compensating for Battlefield Failure
Iran's AI propaganda campaign did not emerge in a vacuum. It is the digital extension of a doctrine the Islamic Republic has pursued since its first large-scale missile attack on Israel in April 2024 — the use of information warfare to manufacture the perception of military power it could not achieve on the battlefield. During Operation True Promise I in April 2024, Iran launched approximately 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles; the overwhelming majority were intercepted. Rather than acknowledge the interception rate, Iranian state media and regime-aligned social media accounts immediately flooded platforms with distorted footage and fabricated imagery. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies documented how, even then, regime-linked accounts posted videos from unrelated conflicts — including Ashkelon rocket footage from October 2023 — and mislabeled them as IRGC cruise missile strikes on Israel.
Operation Roaring Lion accelerated this dynamic dramatically. As Israeli and American strikes degraded Iran's air defenses, missile launchers, and strategic command nodes — including, according to IDF reporting, the "Imam Hussein" Strategic Missile Command in Yazd — Tehran had an even greater incentive to manufacture battlefield victories online that it could not achieve in the air. AI tools, specifically text-to-video models like Google Veo, lowered the production cost of convincing synthetic footage to near zero. The result was an industrial-scale disinformation operation: fake strikes on Tel Aviv skyscrapers, fake rubble at Ben Gurion Airport, fake mass evacuations — all engineered to make a losing military campaign look like a triumph to both domestic Iranian audiences and global social media users.
Conclusion: Why This Myth Is Dangerous
Allowing this claim to stand unchallenged does not merely spread a false historical record — it actively serves Iran's strategic information warfare objectives. By portraying Israel as catastrophically vulnerable and Iran as militarily dominant, the disinformation undermines Israeli deterrence, demoralizes civilian populations, and creates a false impression of Iranian capability that may embolden further aggression. It also erases the genuine significance of Israel's and America's achievement: the most complex multilateral air defense operation in history, protecting millions of civilians against one of the world's largest ballistic missile arsenals. The viral video is not documentation — it is a weapon. And the 27 million views it received represent the precise measure of its intended effect. Rigorous, sourced fact-checking is not a procedural nicety in this environment; it is a direct act of resistance against a state-directed campaign to rewrite the reality of a war in real time.