Pictures show Gaza in ruins, not Myanmar quake damage

After a massive earthquake hit Myanmar on March 28, social media posts falsely claimed images of a destroyed town showed the tremors’ aftermath. The pictures were actually taken in the Gaza Strip in early 2025 after Israeli forces withdrew following a ceasefire.

“A 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Myanmar, devastation everywhere, everything in ruins,” read part of a simplified Chinese caption of a Facebook post published March 29.

The post, which was later deleted, shared four photos of destroyed buildings and rubble.

The clip surfaced one day after a 7.7-magnitude quake struck near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, followed minutes later by a 6.7-magnitude aftershock.

It was the biggest jolt to hit the country in decades, according to geologists, with the disaster killing more than 3,600 people (archived link).

The same photos circulated with similar claims on TikTok, Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — and YouTube.

However, a reverse image search for the first photo in the post led to a TikTok video shared February 20 by a user based in Gaza. The clip shows the same destroyed building (archived link).

A photo from the Turkish Anadolu news agency shows the same scene.

“A view of the destruction in Jabalia camp after Israeli forces withdrew from the area following the ceasefire in Gaza on February 05, 2025,” the caption says.

A halt in fighting in January brought a temporary stop to more than 15 months of war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Israel resumed operations in the Palestinian territory in March after the collapse of the two-month-old ceasefire amidst differences over the next phase (archived link).

AFP has debunked other misinformation about the Myanmar earthquake here, here and here.