The video was shared along with similar claims on YouTube and on South Korean forums DC Inside and FM Korea.
But the clip has nothing to do with the Hwaseong factory fire. It previously circulated in news reports about a deadly explosion in Lebanon in August 2020.
Beirut movie
A combination of reverse image searches and keyword searches on Google and YouTube showed that the video matches footage Al Arabiya published on YouTube on August 10, 2020, days after a massive explosion at Beirut’s port devastated parts of the Lebanese capital (archived link).
The blast killed more than 220 people and injured at least 6,500, AFP reported.
Authorities said the explosion was caused by a fire in a warehouse where a huge stockpile of the industrial chemical ammonium nitrate had been haphazardly stored for years.
Below is a screenshot comparison between the clip shared in the misleading post (left) and the video published by Al Arabiya (right):
The clip published by Al Arabiya contains audio of a couple speaking Arabic while looking at the fire.
Arabic characters for the Emirati logistics company, Aramex can also be seen in the warehouses in the video (archived link).
An August 2020 CNN report that also mentioned the clip said it was filmed by Imad Khalil and Lina Alameh, a couple who witnessed the explosion from their apartment near the harbor (archived link).
Both were seriously injured in the blast and their flat was almost destroyed, the report said.
Images of the Beirut explosion, taken from other angles, were widely published in international news reports at the time, including DW News and Euronews (archived links here). and here).
Although many of the buildings seen in the video were damaged or destroyed, AFP was able to approximate the location of the footage on Google Maps (archived link): the port of Beirut.
Below is a screenshot of a comparison between scenes from the footage shared on TikTok (left and center) and a corresponding location shown on Google Maps Street View (right), with corresponding features highlighted by AFP:
AFP has previously debunked misinformation based on images of the explosion in Beirut here, here and here.
