Amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, an old video is doing the rounds on social media to claim that the incident took place in Gaza and that Palestinians were faking casualties.
However, we could trace the video back to March 2020, and the incident took place in Jordan when people staged a “mock funeral” amid coronavirus curfew.
CLAIM
The claim along with the video mentions that it was captured “today” in Gaza and that the Palestinians were pretending to be at a funeral so that “they would feel sorry for them.”
The video shared by Twitter user ‘@Morelharar1’ had garnered over a lakh views at the time of publishing the article.
Twitter user Pramod Kumar Singh quote-tweeted Mor Elharar’s tweet and wrote: “Truth has an uncanny knack of coming out. Their propaganda went kaput the moment siren blew. Palestinians acting as if they were carrying a body, ran to safety. Watch till the end to find, the corpse coming alive & running for his life. Where are Pulitzer Prizes winners? (sic)”
However, the tweet was later taken down.
Several users, including Dan Poraz, Policy Advisor to Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gabi Ashkenazi, shared the video on Twitter with a similar claim and the archived posts can be viewed here and here.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
Using InVid Google Chrome extension, we fragmented the viral video into multiple keyframes and then conducted a reverse image search on each of them on Yandex.
This led us to a YouTube video uploaded on 26 March 2020. The caption along with the video read: ‘fake funeral in Jordan to break the coronavirus curfew.[sic.]’
We came across a Twitter thread by an account called Palestine Liberation Organisation Department of Public Diplomacy and Policy that shared a YouTube link to suggest that the video is old and from Jordan.
Using the text of the caption mentioned along with the YouTube video uploaded in 2020, we came across a report published by an Egypt-based newspaper called Youm7.
The news report published on 24 March 2020 mentioned that during the coronavirus curfew, young people came up with an innovative idea of a “mock funeral” to get out of the house.
The report also carried a tweet by an Abu Dhabi-based website 24.ae that had shared the viral visuals in March 2020.
Evidently, an old video from Jordan was passed off as people in Palestine faking casualties amid the ongoing conflict.
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN ISRAEL?
At least 21 Palestinians, including nine children, were killed on Monday night, 10 May, after Israel launched airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip, in retaliation to the rockets launched towards Israel by the militant group Hamas, Al Jazeera reported.
Hamas had given an ultimatum demanding Israel to stand down its forces from the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, which saw violent clashes over the weekend, including the storming of forces inside the main prayer hall.
In retaliation to the Israeli air strike that had flattened a tower block in the Strip, Gaza’s Islamist ruler Hamas said it had fired over 130 rockets towards Tel Aviv on Tuesday night, 11 May.
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