Old, Unrelated Clip of a Weapons Raid in Ramallah Falsely Linked to Hamas

It dates back to August 2023 when the IDF and district security found arms and ammunition at a compound in Ramallah.

Fact-Check: This video predates the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. 

(Source: Altered by The Quint) 

A video showing a room filled with weapons is being shared on social media platforms with the claim that they are owned by Palestinian armed resistance group, Hamas.

What did the claim say?: Users also wrote that Hamas had built a tunnel to store a cache of weapons and used residential spaces to conduct such activities.

An archive of the post can be found here. 

(Source: X/Screenshot) 

This post recorded 227.4K views at the time of writing this story. (Archives of similar claims can be found here and here.)

Is this the truth?: No, the claim is false.

• The video is from August and was taken at an arms raid conducted by Israeli forces at a lathe workshop in Beitunia village in Ramallah.

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

• We came across a post by writer and journalist Hanan Amiur who posted the same video on 31 August.

An archive of the post can be found here. 

(Source: X/Screenshot) 

• We compared the frames of both videos and found similarities.

Here is a comparison between the viral video and Hanan Amiur's post. 

(Source: Altered by The Quint) 

• The caption of the post read: “Caught today in Ramallah. A fitting formal parable to mark the 30th anniversary of Oslo - the most serious and disastrous mistake in the history of the Zionist enterprise.” (loosely translated from Hebrew to English)

• Using relevant keywords in Hebrew, we found a news report by Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom from 31 August about the incident.

• We accessed this news report using a virtual private network (VPN).

Here is a preview of the report. 

(Source: Israel Hayom/Screenshot) 

• The report noted that several weapons were seized in the raid conducted by "detectives and investigators" in Beitunia village in Ramallah.

• It also noted that amid the raid "Molotov cocktails and stones were thrown at the forces" during the investigation of the compound, which was reportedly raided over suspicions of a 26-year-old worker using the equipment to make weapons.

• According to a report by The Times of Israel, the worker was accused of manufacturing and distributing arms. After the raid, forces seized all weapons and the combat engineering troops destroyed all lathes.

Conclusion: It is clear that this video predates the recent, ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. It is from a weapons raid that took place in Ramallah in August 2023.

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