On October 26, the Facebook page “Israel – это позитивно)” published a video showing the bodies of people wrapped in white shrouds with Arabic inscriptions on them. The footage shows people wrapped in shrouds moving. According to the description of the video, this is another masterpiece of “Pallywood” (Palestine+Hollywood), which creates the impression that the video was shot in Palestine and thus the information about the victims is falsified.
An identical video with a similar description, as if the moving of the dead body indicates staged footage and exaggeration of the number of victims was shared by Georgian-speaking Facebook users as well.
The disseminated post contains elements of video manipulation. In fact, the video depicts a protest-performance of students in Cairo, the capital of Egypt, in 2013. The video has nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas war.
The video circulating on Facebook depicts a protest-performance held in Cairo in 2013. The original version of the video was published on YouTube by the Egyptian media Elbadil on October 28, 2013. According to Elbadil, the video shows a protest performance against the army by pro-Muslim Brotherhood students at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Students of the Faculty of Arabic Language were protesting the July 3, 2013, military coup in Egypt, as a result of which Army General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew President Mohamed Morsi.
The fact that the footage spread on Facebook is from the video published by Elbadil is confirmed by the logo and a similar caption.
| A shot from the video disseminated on Facebook | A shot from the video published by Elbadil |
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Notably, the video has been circulating for years with a disinformation description and is often used to accuse one of the parties of falsifying information about the victims of various conflicts. In 2021, a video was also circulated to show the spread of false information about casualties by Hamas in Gaza. Back then, the video was verified by the fact-checking service of АFP. The article mentions that in this context the video was shared by Serbian, German, and Czech users. According to АFP Fact-checking, the video was circulated even earlier in 2017 and 2018 to show that the information about casualties during the conflicts in Syria and Palestine was falsified.
In 2021, the same video was used in Georgia and Indonesia to deny the existence of the coronavirus.
It should be noted that a similar case, when the video of a “reanimated corpse” was used to deny the coronavirus pandemic, and as “evidence” of falsification of information about victims during the war, was revealed by “Myth Detector” in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war as well.
The war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, 2023, after the terrorist organization attacked Israel. As of November 1, 1,400 people were killed and more than 5,000 injured in Israel as a result of the conflict, while 239 Israelis are being held hostage in the Gaza Strip. 8,525 people were killed and more than 20,000 injured in the Gaza Strip as a result of Israel’s counterattacks. 125 people were killed and 2,050 injured in the West Bank.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, 2023, “Myth Detector” verified a number of false claims around the topic.
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