Breaking: 2003 footage confirms tonight's Tel Aviv bombing, if you don't check the timestamp

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Good news for anyone who missed the 2003 invasion of Iraq: it is back, and this time it is in Tel Aviv. A video of explosions lighting up a city skyline has been viewed more than 1.4 million times as proof that Iran is bombing Israel tonight. The footage is real. The city is Baghdad. The year is 2003.

This is the beauty of recycled footage. An explosion is an explosion, to anyone who needs one. The Victory Arch in the frame? A monument to the Iran-Iraq war, opened in 1989, in Iraq. The buildings being hit? They match Getty Images footage from two decades ago, frame for frame. But “Baghdad, 2003, again” does not get 1.4 million views. “Tel Aviv right now” does.

The trick is not the video. The trick is the caption. The same clip was repurposed in 2022 to claim it showed Ukraine. Before that, it was just news footage of a war that happened. Each time, it is reborn as whatever the current crisis requires, because the audience does not reverse-image-search a fireball at midnight.

So tonight, if you see a city exploding and the caption says it is happening right now in your preferred conflict, consider the possibility that it happened twenty years ago in a completely different one. The footage does not care. It is available for rent.

Satire verdict: The video is genuine. The caption is a costume it changes between wars.