Right now, if you scroll through social media looking for updates about the war involving Iran, the United States, and Israel, you will see an extraordinary amount of war footage.

Missiles streak across night skies. Drone footage shows explosions blooming across cities. Videos claim to show missile strikes in Tel Aviv or massive explosions in Gulf cities. The clips look and sound real, and they spread with astonishing speed.

But a growing number of them never happened at all.

Investigators and journalists tracking the information about the current conflict have documented waves of AI-generated videos, fabricated satellite images, and manipulated footage circulating online. Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab have flagged multiple viral clips — some accumulating tens of millions of views — as synthetic or recycled from entirely different conflicts.

What’s striking is not simply that these images exist. It’s that the tools required to create them are now widely available.