By Tess McClure
Publication Date: 2026-03-17 05:00:00
TThe freshly dug graves lie in neat rows of 20 each. More than 60 of them have already been dug out of the ground, with a few groups of people standing around them. Dozens more are marked on the ground in front: small chalk rectangles with excavators ready to do their job.
The Minab cemetery, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the city’s young girls, is one of the defining images of the American-Israeli war against Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian casualties.
But is it real?
Ask Gemini, Google’s AI service, and you’ll get the answer “no” – in fact, Gemini claims the photo is from two years earlier and more than 2,000 km (1,240 miles) away. Instead of graves of little girls killed by a rocket, the image shows “a mass burial site in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey” after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 2023. “This particular aerial perspective became one of the most widely circulated images of the disaster,” said Gemini…
