Fact-Check: Old, Unrelated Video Falsely Linked to Dubai Floods

A video of a flood-like situation with camels struggling in the water is being shared as recent visuals from Dubai.

What happened in Dubai?: Last week, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) experienced its most intense rainfall, resulting in flooding in Dubai.

• The lack of regular rainfall has led to inadequate drainage in many roads and areas in Dubai, exacerbating the flooding.

This post recorded 39.2K views at the time of writing this story. (Archives of similar claims can be found here and here.)

Are these visuals from Dubai?: The claim is false.

• Team WebQoof was able to trace the video back to 2018, which predates the recent flood in Dubai.

How did we find out?: We divided the viral video into multiple screenshots and ran a Google and Yandex reverse image search on some of them.

• The results showed us two videos which matched with the frames of the viral video.

• The first video was uploaded by Facebook user Alhaji Ibrahim Butayowo on 27 October 2018.

• It was uploaded with the caption, "The call of the misguided was answered today before Parliament" (translated from Arabic to English using Google Translate).

• A comment under the video wrote, "Hadshi is in Jordan, walking to Morocco."

• Another video on YouTube by a channel named, 'Northeast Live' uploaded a similar video with the title, "Flash flood claims 30 lives in Saudi Arabia." It was uploaded on 15 November 2018."

• We also found a report on MalayalamNewsDaily from 26 October 2018 which contained a frame similar to the viral video.

• It stated that the heavy rainfall in Tabuk city of Saudi Arabia "swept away camels."

• We ran a relevant keyword search in English and Arabic to verify whether such an incident occurred in Tabuk in 2018. The keywords used were "tabuk floods 2018 camels."

• An Al-Arabiya report from 26 October 2018 stated that Tabuk experienced intense rainfall and hailstorms, causing flooding in valleys and reefs.

Conclusion: Clearly, an old and unrelated video is being linked to the floods in Dubai.

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