Does a video on social media show a photo of a burning container ship owned by an Israeli billionaire that was attacked by a suspected Iranian drone on November 25, 2023? No, that's not true: The photo can be traced back to multiple posts from 2019, and it shows a burning oil tanker, not a container ship hit by a suspected Iranian drone.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @fix191919 on November 25, 2023.
The text overlay (translated from Bulgarian to English by Lead Stories staff) reads:
US official: Container ship owned by Israeli billionaire attacked by a suspected Iranian drone in Indian Ocean.
November 25, 2023.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Nov 29 07:55:40 2023 UTC)
Lead Stories used Google Lens reverse image search on November 29, 2023, (archived here) for the photo of the burning ship in the TikTok video. Results indicate it's an incident from June 2019. In addition, the burning ship in the photo is an oil tanker, which is very different from a container ship, as the TikTok video erroneously claims.
The image from the TikTok video can be found in numerous articles and media reports from 2019, such as here and here. According to a CNN article from June 13, 2019, it refers to an incident in which two large oil tankers were damaged by an attack in the Gulf of Oman. The image from the TikTok video is visible at the 1:59 mark of a news video report on ABC News from June 14, 2019.
There was an incident on November 25, 2023, when a strike by a suspected Iranian drone caused damage to a ship owned by an Israeli company that a Reuters article described as "minor."
