In mid-March 2026, a claim spread online that NBC News foreign correspondent Richard Engel had been injured while reporting in Israel.
The rumor largely circulated on Facebook, sometimes accompanied by images supposedly showing Engel in a hospital bed. Snopes readers contacted us to ask whether the rumor was true.
(Facebook user Watch Weekly)
However, the rumor originated as content generated via artificial intelligence by blog pages that use these tools to create fictional inspiring or shocking stories about public figures, often for financial gain.
Engel confirmed that rumors about his supposed injuries or ill health were "totally not true" in a March 10 podcast episode of "The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim."
"There's serious consequences here," Engel said, adding: "They either want me dead, or to sow doubt, or just confuse people. It's a very, very bad precedent."
Engel also posted a March 12 video (archived) on X from Israel in which he appeared alive, well and not hospitalized, contrary to the claims. NBC also has not released any news releases about Engel's supposed injuries, which the company almost certainly would have done if he was actually seriously hurt.
As such, we have rated this claim false. Engel and NBC did not immediately return a request for additional comment.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a record 129 media members were killed in 2025 — and Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all such killings in 2025 and 2024.
Engel dispels rumors
Here are Engel's full comments on fake, AI-generated stories about him, starting at starting at 1:46 in this YouTube video of his podcast with Hakim (emphasis ours):
HAKIM: So, Richard, I hope you're well. But according to the Internet, you're very unwell and we have both become, now, victims of deepfakes. Something I know that really gives you anxiety and pause whenever you think about deepfakes and AI, and frankly, it should do for all of us. But I can report that you look well and from what I understand, you are well.
ENGEL: Very well, thank you. And yeah, it's scary. I don't know why. I don't know who did it. I don't know. But there's all these reports on the internet.
I just saw a photograph of me laying on my back in a hospital bed with tubes and Mary, my wife, looking lovingly in my eyes as if this is some sort of final moment. Totally not true. Mary, her only comment was, "I don't think my nose looks good in that photo." So, nobody's freaking out on this. I'm not freaking out. Mary's not freaking out.
But there's serious consequences here, because let's say there was a situation. Let's say I was hurt, or you were hurt, or there's a real situation, as there are real situations every single day. And now the whole internet that people rely on is just totally polluted with deepfakes and garbage and it's bad. For some reason they don't want to — they either want me dead, or to sow doubt, or just confuse people. It's a very, very bad precedent.
Welcome to the world we're in — which, if I can plug the show, this is not fake. This is not an AI thing. The two of us are really talking right now.
How to tell claims are AI slop
As Engels mentioned, many of the images shared alongside the claim were the product of AI image-generation software, although many blogs appeared to mix real images with fake ones.
For example, ZeroGPT and Hive Moderation, two tools that detect AI generation, both said that the hospital picture Engels referenced had an extremely high likelihood of generation via artificial intelligence.
(These types of AI detection tools are fallible. Snopes cautions people against using them for definitive answers on media's authenticity without supporting evidence.)
While the AI-generated pictures of Engels did not have any obvious abnormalities, they still raised several red flags, including the fact that he did not have any visible injuries in many of them. The images also resembled stock photos — generic, professionally shot images licensed for commercial use — of hospital patients. AI generation tools rely on vast datasets of publicly available content to generate images, which means many images turn out looking generic.
Furthermore, many of the Facebook pages sharing the post included links to poorly designed blogs with other articles that appeared to be written in English, but used similar-looking letters from other alphabets. For example, one article used the Greek letter "σ" instead of "o."
These articles also had several indications of AI-generated text, such as vague but emotional language that offered no verifiable quotations, dates or other details.
The fictional story resembled glurge, which we have previously defined as "a sentimental or heart-rending story that undermines its own inspirational message by distorting — or ignoring — the facts."
Snopes has debunked similar rumors before. For example, in March 2026,