Old video shared as recent Houthi attack on Israeli ship

What's the claim?

A video of a cargo ship on fire in the middle of the sea, with black smoke billowing from it and tugboats extinguishing the flames, has been shared widely on social media with claims it shows Israel's MSC Sarah V vessel being attacked by the Yemeni extremist group, the Houthis.

A user on X (formerly Twitter) shared the clip with the caption, "BREAKING Israeli cargo ship MSC Sarah V after being hit by a missile fired by Yemen Houthis." The post had over 36,000 views at the time of writing this story. Archived versions of other such posts can be found here and here.

Screenshot of claims made online. (Source: X/Modified by Logically Facts)

However, the video is old and does not show a Houthi attack on an Israeli ship.

What we found

Logically Facts conducted a reverse image search using different keyframes from the viral clip and discovered a video report from a Sri Lanka news network, Hiru News (archived here), published on YouTube on April 5, 2017. The video report contained similar visuals of the cargo ship on fire as those seen in the now-viral clip. We could see similar visuals at the timestamp of 0:24 seconds into the YouTube video. The title stated that it was a Daniela ship that caught fire. This indicates that this video has been online since at least 2017 and is not recent.

The Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) also documented images of the MSC Daniela ship in flames and the firefighting response. The pictures are similar to the scenes in the viral video. SLAF assisted in dousing the fire on the MSC Daniela cargo ship by deploying a Bell 212 Helicopter with a Bambi bucket.

MSC Daniela, the lead ship of her class of container vessels operated by the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), experienced a fire on board on April 4, 2017. On April 5, 2017, the company released a statement confirming that a fire had broken out toward the bow of the MSC Daniela while it was sailing from Singapore to Port Said.

Screenshot of the YouTube video. (Source: X/YouTube)

This all confirms the incident shown in the viral clip is of MSC Daniela catching fire near Sri Lanka in 2017, not an attack on Israel's MSC Sarah V by Yemen's Houthis.

According to a Reuters report, Yemen's Houthis claimed on June 25, 2024, that they used a new ballistic missile to strike the MSC Sarah V vessel in the Arabian Sea, taking responsibility for an attack reported the previous day. However, the visuals in the viral clip are not from this recent alleged attack. The Houthi rebels have expressed solidarity with Palestine amid the Israel-Hamas war and have since June carried out drone strikes at Israeli ports.

The verdict

A video from April 2017 of the container ship named MSC Daniela, operated by the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), that caught fire near the Sri Lankan coast has been shared as an attack by Houthis on an Israeli ship. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.