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It’s a quaint museum in a coastal town whose aim is to educate Scotland about its rich maritime heritage. Housed within an A-listed Victorian building in Irvine, the Scottish Maritime Museum is a popular attraction hosting exhibitions, workshops and play sessions for children.
But we can reveal today that one of the most advanced military forces in the world used 3D scans of the museum’s boat building workshop in propaganda videos for its operations in Gaza, Iran and Syria.
A months-long investigation by The Ferret and a group of international journalists found there have been 40 propaganda animations produced by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the past two years – including several using the Scottish Maritime Museum’s 3D scans.
The IDF’s videos have been widely disseminated through its official channels and picked up by major media worldwide including the BBC, Daily Mail, Fox News and CNN, giving them significant reach.
The IDF presents these videos as intelligence derived illustrations. One of the most well-known examples is the Al Shifa Hospital animation, released in 2023. It claimed to reveal what lay beneath Gaza’s largest medical complex which the IDF later destroyed.
The 3D scans used by the IDF were sourced from the video game industry and the Scottish Maritime Museum’s online boat building workshop – but they appear uncredited in the propaganda videos.
In response to our findings, politicians and academics said it was “deeply disturbing” to learn the IDF used the museum’s online material to spread propaganda with “fabricated content” that aims to justify its military operations.
The IDF said that claims regarding inaccuracies or the use of “exaggerated” elements do not reflect the reality and are “simply unfounded”. An Israeli professor said the propaganda videos are an attempt to “better communicate the complex reality of urban warfare”.
The Scottish Maritime Museum confirmed some of its models are available online through Creative Commons licensing, but stressed it has no control over how the data is used. Following our request for a comment the museum’s 3D scans used by the IDF are no longer publicly available.
Israel’s military operations escalated after the terror attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, that led to an estimated 1,200 people being murdered and another 250 taken hostage.
Since then Israel has bombed Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria – and the IDF’s spokesperson’s unit has released more than 40 animated illustrations to highlight and explain its operations.
These videos often present fabricated “illustrations” of alleged Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iranian sites and have become a recognisable visual feature of Israeli military communication. Often, real drone footage of airstrikes compliment the videos, as if the animations were delivered directly from a mission briefing room.
The majority of these animations depict sites that cannot easily be seen or verified: underground bunkers, missile depots hidden in civilian buildings, labyrinths of tunnels. They also serve a strategic function, aligning with military aims around politically contentious sites.
The IDF presents these videos as intelligence derived illustrations. In reality many of the environments they depict are, at least in part, borrowed from artists far removed from Israel’s wars.
They include subscriber-only assets from the video game industry, and scans of the Scottish Maritime Museum boat building workshop. All have been dropped, without credit, into animations presented as “illustrations” of Hamas bunkers or Iranian weapons sites.
Once repackaged by the IDF, an electricity box from a Scottish museum workshop became part of a secret Iranian bunker, and a street corner from suburban Washington was proof of a Hamas command centre.
The IDF used 3D scans from the Scottish Boatbuilding School at Irvine’s Maritime Museum, which was established in 2014 to provide education in both traditional and modern boat building.
The museum uploaded a 3D model of its boat building workshop in 2019 including workbenches, cabinets, and a distinctive electricity box that appear in IDF animations of underground missile factories.
The electricity box and workbench can be seen in this propaganda video which was produced to explain an undercover operation by the IDF to “dismantle an Iranian-funded underground precision missile production site” in Masyaf, Syria, on 8 September 2025.
The electricity box was used again in an IDF video which explains Israeli strikes near Tehran on 20 June 2025. The IDF’s accompanying post on X said: “More than 50 fighter jets attacked selected targets of the nuclear weapons program and missile component manufacturing sites in Tehran”.
Another video, published across various IDF social media channels on 5 September 2025, repurposed the elements of the electricity box scan once more, this time depicting the interior of a high-rise building in Gaza City allegedly used by Hamas.
The models appear to be made in-house by a dedicated cell within the Spokesperson’s Unit’s Production and Media Branch. Former staff refer to this as the “After Effects cell”, named after the popular motion graphics software. It is a cluster of young motion designers, 3D modelers, and animators who work primarily with well-known software such as Adobe, but also use other tools like Blender, an open source programme used for 3D modeling.
“Some of the models are made for the videos,” one former animator told us. “Others are taken from other places because they don’t have any intelligence significance. It serves the purpose.”
Officially, every video is cleared by an intelligence officer. But sources claimed the distinction between illustration and evidence is not made clear and missing details are simply filled in with pre-fabricated assets and recycled interiors are assembled quickly into a coherent scene, and then sent to senior officers for approval.
Sometimes the workflow begins long before the operation itself. In a Hebrew language TikTok posted by the IDF after their June 2025 strikes on Iran, soldiers from the unit describe being told almost a month in advance, and signing confidentiality agreements and working under what they called “prime-minister-level secrecy”.
They recount being briefed by intelligence officers. “They simply told us that there might be an attack in Iran,” one animator explains, “and you are responsible for it. Make me such a message in the video.”
The Al Shifa hospital animation became one of the most well-known examples of Israel’s wartime communication strategy. On October 27, 2023 the IDF released a video claiming to reveal what lay beneath Al Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It included underground tunnels, bunkers, a Hamas command room – all shown in clean 3D graphics.
“That information is ironclad,” insisted Mark Regev, a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during an interview the same day on CNN. “It’s based on Israeli intelligence.”
The IDF raid on the hospital itself would not come until mid-November and the clip was pushed simultaneously across the IDF’s Telegram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. On Neanyahu’s own X profile it drew tens of millions of views. Over the next weeks, CNN, the BBC, and other media outlets used it. BBC Verify also investigated the IDF’s claims and cast doubt on them.
Our investigation found the bunker in that video was not unique, and a command room featured had already appeared a year earlier beneath an earlier IDF animation of a tunnel beneath an UNRWA school. The hospital exterior was manufactured and the surrounding streets were populated with storefronts from a commercial 3D asset pack – complete with fictional shops like Fabio’s Pizzeria, Andre’s Bakery, and Revolution Bike Shop.
Ruth Maguire, the SNP MSP for Cunninghame South, which includes Irvine, where the Scottish Maritime Museum is based, said it was “unsurprising that an army being deployed by their government in an illegal occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people is “using propaganda containing false and misleading claims”. She added: “What my constituents may be surprised and concerned by is that national broadcasters are picking it up and sharing it. I certainly don’t think anyone would imagine that our Maritime Museum assets were being used in this ongoing crime against humanity.”
It is a sign of how little regard they have for the truth when they are incorrectly taking images from museums, and it underlines that we cannot trust a word that they say.
Patrick Harvie MSP, of the Scottish Greens.
The Scottish Greens MSP Patrick Harvie accused the IDF of making and sharing “misleading” propaganda videos in order to “justify their onslaught” against the people of Gaza. He added: “It is a sign of how little regard they have for the truth when they are incorrectly taking images from museums, and it underlines that we cannot trust a word that they say.
“When lies and misinformation are such a core part of an army’s strategy it makes it all the more important that our governments take a stand and act to stop the atrocities that they are inflicting.”
Professor Eyad Elyan, a Palestinian from the West Bank now living in Aberdeen who specialises in AI and 3D modelling at Robert Gordon University, also said the findings were “deeply disturbing,” claiming “this aligns with Israel and the IDF’s long history of exploiting others’ resources and employing every means possible to promote baseless claims”.
He added: “Much of this material consisted of outright falsehoods. These actions by the IDF persist because they believe they enjoy complete impunity.”
The IDF said the use of visualization tools, including graphic models, is a common practice in explaining information to the public worldwide and “does not compromise the credibility or accuracy” of the messages conveyed.
A spokesperson added that the videos released are intended to illustrate to the public the “methods of operation used by terrorist organisations and their cynical exploitation” of the civilian population and civilian infrastructure for combat purposes.
All content is based on verified intelligence from a variety of sources, the spokesperson continued, adding: “When three-dimensional or animated visualizations are used, it is clearly indicated, and their purpose is to present complex information in a clear and accessible visual manner – not to produce an exact reconstruction of every physical detail in the area. Moreover, in many cases where possible, additional visuals from the ground have been presented, including hundreds of photos and videos demonstrating what is shown in the three-dimensional or animated illustrations.”
“The claim that the IDF uses visual illustrations to portray all civilian infrastructure within different combat zones as military sites is inaccurate. The purpose of these illustrations is to demonstrate a reality that has been repeatedly proven on the ground – that terrorist organizations embed their assets within such infrastructure and operate under the cover of the civilian population.”
Paul Dobson
Professor Moran Yarchi, head of digital influence and perceptions specialisation, Reichman University, Israel, said the videos are a “point in the right direction” and an “attempt to better communicate the complex reality of urban warfare” in a populated place.
She added: “I think that it’s actually part of the toolbox that every political actor has to use. Since we’re dealing with a complex reality in which conflicts are not being fought solely on the military battlefield, there are fights over perceptions, and the image war is a salient part of it – and we know that international image has a significant impact.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “We use third party graphics with attribution. In this case we have been clear that the animations have been released by the IDF.”
This investigation was initiated in January 2025 by Jack Sapoch, Robin Kötzle, Nicole Vögele, and Jake Charles Rees, as part of their collaborative work under the banner of Viewfinder, an independent research collective.
Hundreds of protected areas are under pressure from Scotland’s massive deer herd. Most agree deer numbers must be controlled to protect the environment, but are split on what should be done.
Edinburgh University students were “interrogated” by police at their desks over posters featuring Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, prompting dozens to complain.
Unsafe levels of faecal bacteria were recorded at dozens of Scotland’s best beaches this summer. Swimmers and paddlers could be at risk, but officials insist water quality remains high.
Footage of farmed trout suffocating, haemorrhaging, and being beaten with batons in a slaughterhouse has prompted an official complaint to a government regulator.
