a A video circulating on social media claims to show a ship on fire near Haifa, Israel, after being targeted by Yemen’s Huthi rebels and Iraq’s Islamic Resistance. This is wrong; the clip is from 2019 and shows gas tankers that caught fire while refueling Handover.
“Yemen and Iraq successfully attacked two Israeli ships carrying Israeli military equipment in the port of Ha*ifa,” said a June 6, 2024 message in which the film material on X.
The claim spread elsewhere on X and Facebook, including in Thai, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French and Indonesian.
Since November 2023, the Huthis have been attacking shipping around the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. They say their actions are in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has been at war with the militant group Hamas since October 7.
US and British forces have responded with attacks on the rebels, who have since also targeted US and British interests. The attacks have prompted some shipping companies to take a detour around southern Africa to avoid the Red Sea, a route that normally carries about 12 percent of world trade.
The Huthis claimed that in early June 2024 she and Iraq’s Islamic Resistance, a loose fitting alliance of pro-Iranian groups jointly launched two attacks on ships carrying military equipment in the Israeli port of Haifa.
But the Israeli army told multiple media outlets that the claim was false (archived here and here) – and that the video being circulated online is not recent.
Discovered a reverse image and keyword search the video, credited to Reuters, in a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Report (archived here).
Two commercial ships – the Maestro and Kandy, operating under the Tanzanian flag – caught fire on January 21, 2019 near the Kerch Strait, which connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov off the coast of Crimea.
The fire broke out when one ship was transferring fuel to another, forcing both crews to jump overboard. There were fourteen people killed.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the war between Israel and Hamas here.
