Social media posts claiming Palestinian flags recently appeared on Europe’s most famous landmarks have gone viral, but a fact check reveals the footage combines old news clips with AI-generated fabrications.
The viral videos arrived as protests swept across European cities, giving the false claims a veneer of credibility. One clip supposedly shows a Palestinian flag draped from Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa. Another purports to capture the same act at Paris’s Eiffel Tower.
Neither video holds up under scrutiny.
The Pisa footage actually dates back to November 2023. Al Jazeera and Sky News both reported on the incident at that time, when activists hung a Palestinian flag from the tower and ignited smoke flares. The demonstration protested Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and demanded a ceasefire. However, social media users recirculated this old footage in October 2026 as if it showed a current event.
The Eiffel Tower clip proved even more problematic. A reverse image search turned up no credible news reports or sources sharing the footage. Hive Moderation, an AI detection tool, then analyzed the video and flagged it as 65.3 percent likely to be AI-generated.
Close observation revealed further signs of manipulation. Midway through the clip, the tower’s structure appears visibly distorted, a telltale marker of synthetic content. Meanwhile, the flag shown in the video does not actually match the Palestinian flag’s design.
As a result, both viral claims collapse under basic verification. One clip repackages legitimate protest footage from three years earlier. The other appears entirely manufactured by artificial intelligence.
The spread of such misleading content highlights how quickly fabricated visuals can exploit real political tensions. With protests ongoing across Europe, these videos aimed to inflate perceptions of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at iconic sites. Fact checkers continue to flag similar claims as they surface online.
