RMC Découverte has apologised after a documentary on France’s next nuclear missile showed the warhead landing on Tel Aviv.
The clip ran in Rafale, drones et canons : la révolution des armes françaises, a documentary on modern French weaponry first broadcast on September 1.
It was meant to illustrate the ASN4G, the fourth-generation air-to-surface nuclear missile planned for the Rafale F5 fighter jet.
The animation showed a mushroom cloud over a recognisable Israeli coastal skyline.
Héloïse Fayet, a researcher on nuclear weapons and the Middle East at the Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI), asked the channel on September 17 why France was firing a nuclear missile at Tel Aviv and noted that the blast yield on screen was far smaller than the ASN4G is supposed to carry.
By then the sequence had been circulating on social media as an illustration of French strike power. The clip was soon removed.
Bonjour @RMCDecouverte, un peu de contexte pour expliquer pourquoi la France tire un missile nucléaire sur Tel Aviv dans votre « documentaire » (sans parler de la puissance de l’explosion qui est largement inférieure à la charge supposée de l’ASN4G) ? https://t.co/rroMFStKVN
— Héloïse Fayet (@HFayet) September 17, 2026
On September 18 the channel posted a communiqué on X, not on its website. It offered “sincere apologies” for using an image of Tel Aviv.
The shot, it said, came from a professional stock library that had “incorrectly identified and catalogued” it.
As soon as RMC Découverte was told, it pulled the film from its platforms and stopped further broadcasts. A cut without that sequence would follow.
The channel said it reserved the right to take legal action against whoever had mislabelled the city.
The missile itself does not yet exist. The Direction générale de l’armement, the French procurement agency, ordered the ASN4G from MBDA on June 2, for service around 2035 and with a range beyond 1,000km — about double that of the ASMPA-R it replaces.
France and Israel are long-standing defence and industrial partners, and Paris still sells Rafales into a region where Israel is the only state widely believed to hold nuclear weapons, a capability it has never acknowledged.
The relationship has become strained though, with France condemning Israeli policies towards Palestinians.
On September 8, Paris joined 11 other governments in announcing an end to trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, after foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the territory was “close to exploding” — unchecked settlement growth, settler violence and acts of terror condemned by Israeli authorities themselves.
On June 9, France banned finance minister Bezalel Smotrich from its soil for promoting annexation and the “re-colonisation” of Gaza. Itamar Ben-Gvir was barred on May 23, after he mocked activists detained from a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.
Israel in turn says it has been noticing rising anti-Semitism in France, including synagogue attacks, school harassment and insults towards Jews. The French interior ministry recorded 2,489 anti-religious acts in 2025, more than half of them anti-Semitic.
Communiqué RMC Découverte pic.twitter.com/GRGNHLE2Yo
— RMC Découverte (@RMCDecouverte) September 18, 2026
