Fake Map Cited by Iranian Media to Claim Missiles Did Not Strike Israeli Hospital
What happened: Iranian state media outlets, top officials, and embassies baselessly claimed that an Iranian missile strike reported by Western sources as hitting a hospital in Beersheba, Israel, actually struck an Israeli military command and intelligence center, citing a doctored map as evidence.
Context: On June 19, 2025, Iranian missiles struck Soroka Medical Center, the largest hospital in southern Israel, causing extensive damage and multiple injuries, according to multiple news reports.
A closer look: Following the attack, Iranian sources cited an image of a map purporting to show the Gav-Yam Negev Advanced Technologies Park (an Israeli tech and military hub) and the Israeli Defense Force’s Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence headquarters, as being located adjacent to the hospital, claiming that these facilities were the actual targets. They also claimed that any damage at the hospital resulted from a shockwave.
The false claim appears to have originated in a June 19 Telegram post by Iranian state-run Fars News Agency, which is known to be linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The claim was also advanced by other Iranian state-run news outlets including Mehr News (Trust Score: 5/100) and Pars Today (Trust Score: 7.5/100).
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, included the image of the map in an X post and stated, “Our powerful Armed Forces accurately eliminated an Israeli Military Command, Control & Intelligence HQ and another vital target. The blast wave caused superficial damage to a small section of the nearby, and largely evacuated, Soroka Military Hospital.” The post generated 2.4 million views and 23,000 likes in one day.
In a June 19 X post, the account of the Iran Embassy in Australia stated, “It is evident that spreading false claims about an attack on Soroka Hospital is part of Israel’s deceptive strategy to justify its ongoing crimes against civilians in Iran.”
Actually: The map is fabricated, with open-source data contradicting the claim that Israeli military and intelligence facilities are located near the hospital. Moreover, news reports, open-source data, images, and videos confirm that the hospital was directly hit, not damaged by a shockwave.
In a June 19 X thread, Tal Hagin, an open source researcher for the Israeli disinformation watchdog FakeReporter, citing open-source data geolocation, blast triangulation, and publicly available reports, stated, “The map is entirely fabricated and does not align with real-world imagery of the area.” Hagin noted, and NewsGuard confirmed using Google Maps, that neither the Gav-Yam Negev Advanced Technologies Park nor the IDF outpost is adjacent to the hospital, as the widely circulated map claims to show.
The Jerusalem Post (Trust Score: 92.5/100) noted that the map’s distorted lettering, mislabeled roads, and inclusion of non-existent streets were likely the result of AI. NewsGuard ran the image through AI detector Hive, which determined with 75 percent certainty that the image of the map is AI generated.
Reuters (Trust Score: 100/100), The Associated Press (Trust Score: 100/100), and other news outlets published images and videos depicting the aftermath of the attack on the Soroka Hospital, showing clear strike points. Trevor Lawrence, an explosives expert at the U.K.'s Cranfield University, told the BBC (Trust Score: 95/100), “The video of the building shows extensive damage to the top but relatively little damage to the sides, which would suggest a direct hit rather than the effect of an adjacent blast.”
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