The U.S. Defense Department was forced on Monday to deny it had struck Iran’s main petroleum export facility after President Donald Trump posted a fake, AI-generated video showing a purported attack by American forces.
The video, posted to the president’s Truth Social account, appears to show storage tanks and refining facilities erupting in flames from the perspective of someone filming from inside a helicopter above the carnage, with an accompanying message describing the scene as “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens” and signed as “President DJT.”
But a U.S. official said no such attack had taken place, with Kharg Island not being among the locations targeted overnight in what has been the first exchange of fire between American and Iranian forces in weeks.
Iranian media outlets did report explosions near Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz, where an American official said Tehran had been preparing to launch mine-laying rockets as part of the country’s bid to choke off the key waterway and hamstring the American economy in response to Trump’s war, which has now passed the half-year mark without end in sight.
In response, Iranian forces fired missiles at Jordan, but an American official told CNN those had been intercepted.
Speaking with Fox News on Sunday, President Trump defended the Iran campaign, arguing the U.S. was winning the war, even if a final, durable peace deal had not been inked.
“I don’t need a signature on a piece of paper,” Trump said.
He also argued that Democratic critics of the war were trying to sabotage the operation, invoking an argument used by Republican presidents defending unpopular wars from Richard Nixon in the Vietnam War era to George W. Bush after the invasion of Iraq.