A photo is circulating on social media that is said to belong to Ali Khamenei , Iran's supreme leader, who was reportedly killed during the bombings.
It is not known whether the photo was taken with Artificial Intelligence or is real, as the person's face is not visible in the image.
First, VoxNews uploaded the image to Google's Gemini , which used the SynthID watermarking tool to determine whether the image was modified or generated with Google's AI tools: This image contains a SynthID watermark, which indicates that it was generated in whole or in part using Google's AI tools .

Second step, VoxNews performed a reverse image search on the photograph using Google Image search that was limited to websites with the Iranian country code " .ir " and none of the results returned were from Iranian websites, X accounts, or Facebook pages.

According to VoxNews ' final research , the photo was generated by AI. The " Hive Moderation " also concluded that the image was 64.1% "likely to be AI-generated," with the strongest signal actually detected for Google's Gemini3 model.
Recall that Ali Khamenei succeeded the founder of the Islamic Revolution in 1989. He was killed in an attack by Israel and the United States, Iranian state media confirmed.
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