Storm-1516, a Russia-linked influence operation — which routinely disseminates fabricated claims about Europe and the West — comes in all shapes and sizes.
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This time round, researchers say it could be behind a social media video in which alleged militants from Hezbollah — an Iran-backed Lebanese militant group — threatened to carry out attacks on French soil ahead of Bastille Day celebrations on 14 July.
In the video, three hooded men wearing military uniforms pose in front of a dummy of a French Foreign Legion soldier, whose face had the French flag painted on.
They threaten to “shed blood” on 14 July if France continues to “supply weapons” to the “Zionist regime”, in an apparent reference to Israel.
At the end of the clip, one man uses a knife to decapitate the dummy.
What do we know about this video?
The clip first spread on Telegram before moving to X and Facebook, gaining almost one million views across X posts.
In the content analysed by Euronews’s verification team, The Cube, the men don’t make an explicit reference to the group they belong to. However, the arm patch on the men’s uniform resembles Hezbollah, whose armed wing is classified as a terrorist organisation by the European Union.
In addition, social media posts also refer to them as Hezbollah.
However, there is a series of clues which suggest the video is fake. To begin, the video does not bear the group’s logo, which is typically included in content disseminated on its official channels.
Colleagues from Euronews Arabic-speaking service also told us that the accent resembled Levantine Arabic but not a Lebanese Arabic accent, adding that the speaker made multiple grammatical mistakes. This suggests that the video does not belong to Hezbollah.
Fact-checkers from AFP reported that the video spread through a series of posts published on the same day by a network of accounts that regularly use pro-Russian narratives.
They include accounts that are favourable to the Alliance of Sahel States, a group of countries that includes Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, has ties to Iran and is openly anti-Western.
Fact-checkers have also reported that the video was picked up by anti-Israel accounts, as well as by users who regularly reshare conspiracy theories.
Storm-1516’s changing faces
The video bears similarities to other content connected to the Storm-1516 disinformation campaign, as well as fake content targeting Ukraine and Western countries.
The network produces a wide variety of content, which includes impersonating European journalists and news outlets, paying actors to pose as fake whistleblowers, and increasingly incorporating AI-generated content into its operations.
Researchers have highlighted similarities between the latest fake Hezbollah clip and other Russia-linked content — including a clip flagged by the Gnida project, an anonymous research group tracking Russian influence operations, which was published in January 2025.
The video in question showed individuals claiming to belong to HTS — the Islamist group formerly led by Syria’s current president, Ahmed al-Sharaa — threaten to burn down Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, unless French authorities release Brahim Aouissaoui. The latter, a Tunisian citizen, killed three people during a terror attack he carried out in Nice in 2020.
Another example was a video purporting to show Hamas threatening attacks in France ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center examined the clip and deemed it to be consistent with Storm-1516’s tactics, while Hamas denied producing the video.
