Fact-Check: Old Video of Israeli Attack on Al Aqsa Mosque Viral as Recent

This video is from May 2021 when Israeli forces attacked Palestinian women inside Al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestine.

Fact-Check: This video is not related to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. 

(Source: Altered by The Quint) 

A video showing several women in headscarves running and shouting with smoke around them and bomb sounds in the background is being shared on social media.

What are the users saying?: Users have claimed that it shows a recent attack by Israeli forces, targeted towards Palestinian women.

An archive of the post can be found here. 

(Source: X/Screenshot) 

This post recorded 371.2K views at the time of writing this story. (Archives of similar claims can be found here, here and here.)

What is the truth?: This video is from May 2021 and not from the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas that began on 7 October.

• In May 2021 the Israeli security forces attacked Palestinian women inside the Al-Aqsa mosque.

How did we find out?: We divided the video into multiple keyframes and ran a Google reverse image search on some.

• It led us to a video uploaded on YouTube by Middle East Eye (MEE) on 10 May 2021, which was the same as the viral video.

• The video was uploaded with the caption that read, "Israeli police fire stun grenades directly at women inside al-Aqsa Mosque as they raided the complex early on Monday."

• Apart from the video, MEE published a timeline of events that led to the attack on Al-Aqsa mosque on 12 May 2021.

• It noted that in May 2021 Jerusalem saw severe Israeli restrictions on "Palestinian access to parts of the Old City during the month of Ramadan."

• Israeli officials had made attempts to evict several Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah area in the city for Israelis.

• This led to the Al-Aqsa mosque being attacked "four times in five days."

Here is a preview of the report. 

(Source: MEE/Screenshot) 

• Apart from this, we came across a post on X by Palestine-based news page called Times of Gaza which included the same video as the viral video uploaded on 10 May 2021.

• It's caption read, "Women are being targeted by Israeli forces in Al Aqsa Mosque. Grenades are being thrown at defenceless women."

An archive of the post can be found here. 

(Source: X/Screenshot/Altered by The Quint) 

Conclusion: Clearly this video is old, from May 2021 when the Israeli forces attacked the Al Aqsa mosque, and is not related to ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.

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