Viral video of Israeli forces taking away boy from West Bank camp is 8-year-old

A video of a group of soldiers in uniform forcefully detaining a young child is being shared widely on social media. When a bystander protests against this, the officers push him off and whisk the boy away.

A user named ‘Ragged Trousered Philanderer’ tweeted the video and wrote, “Imagine just how helpless and humiliated you’d feel to be a Palestinian father watching armed enemy Israeli soldiers abduct your children and take them off to god knows where to be beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted and detained for months or years?” (Archived link)

Imagine just how helpless and humiliated you’d feel to be a Palestinian father watching armed enemy Israeli soldiers abduct your children and take them off to god knows where to be beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted and detained for months or years?pic.twitter.com/sF0iKTAPzc

— Ragged Trousered Philanderer (@RaggedTP) November 1, 2023

RJ Sayema quoted this tweet and wrote, “Tears my heart apart! This is cruelty of unimaginable magnitude. Stop the bloodshed in Gaza.” (Archived link)

A user named Al-Musawi Ahmed also made a similar claim in Arabic while tweeting the video. (Archived link)

A number of users are amplifying this video on social media platforms.

Fact Check

Alt News performed a reverse image search using a frame taken from the viral video. This led us to an article by RT (formerly Russia Today) dated November 18, 2015 related to this video, which also contained footage seen in the clip in question. The report quoted local activist group Popular Struggle Coordination Committee as saying that Israeli forces had detained a six-year-old boy and an activist in the Aida Palestinian Refugee Camp in the West Bank. In this report, the boy has been identified as Abdullah Lutfi Yusuf.

Popular Struggle Coordination Committee had posted this video on Facebook on November 17, 2015. In the video, the person with whom the Israeli forces clash is identified as Munthar Amira, an activist of the same collective.

The report further states that a group of people from the refugee camp had reportedly attempted to free six-year-old Abdullah, and that the Israeli military alleged that the boy had tried to attack an Israeli soldier. Abdullah was later released after being kept in custody for several hours. However, activist Munthar Amira was kept in custody at an undisclosed location.

To sum it up, many users shared an eight-year-old video of Israeli forces detaining a six-year-old boy from a Palestinian refugee camp without any context amid the recent conflict between Israel and Palestine.