AI-generated image falsely passed off as Iran president's UN speech photo

TLDR

• A Facebook post claims to show Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian holding a photo of children killed in the Minab school strike and a pink school bag during his UN address.¹
• AFP found the image is AI-generated: it replaces the real photo he held with a synthetic one and adds a pink school bag he never held.¹
• UN-distributed video and AFP's own photos of the September 23 speech show neither detail actually appeared.¹
• The Minab strike killed at least 155 people in February, at the start of the US-Israel war with Iran; no country has officially claimed responsibility.¹

An AI-generated image falsely claiming to show Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian's address to the UN General Assembly has spread on Facebook, superimposed with text referencing the Minab school tragedy.¹ The circulating picture shows Pezeshkian holding up a photo of children in front of rubble in one hand and a pink school bag in the other, captioned as proof he confronted the assembly over the strike.¹

AFP Fact Check traced the claim to a Facebook post shared on September 24, 2026, days after Pezeshkian addressed the UN in New York on September 23.¹ Pezeshkian did hold up photos of children killed in the February strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, which killed at least 155 people, mostly children, during the opening days of the US-Israel war with Iran.¹ Iran says two US Tomahawk missiles hit the school, though neither Washington nor Israel has officially claimed the strike.¹

Why it matters: the specific photo and school bag in the circulating image do not match what Pezeshkian actually held.¹ Videos of the assembly distributed by AFP and posted by the UN's own YouTube channel show he did not carry a pink school bag at any point in the speech, and the children's photo he displayed differs from the one in the doctored image.¹ Children's backpacks have circulated before as a symbolic reference to the strike, which AFP notes the fabricated image appears to exploit for added emotional weight.¹

The post has spread widely on Facebook since Pezeshkian's speech, in which he told the assembly Iran would never "bend at the knee" and accused Washington of "terrorism" over the assassination of former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the start of the war.¹ AFP's verification relied on comparing the circulating image against its own photographs and UN-distributed video of the actual address, rather than forensic AI-detection tooling, underscoring how primary-source video remains the most reliable check against a fabricated still image.¹