A video of people covered in shrouds lying on the ground is circulating on social media with the claim that Palestinians are faking casualties and shooting videos of the same to tarnish Israel’s global reputation.
Facebook users Hiren Savani and Uday Kumar Sharma, BJP’s Ashish Mehta and Shwetabh Pathak posted the video with the same narrative.
Twitter user @MirYanaSY amplified the claim as well.
#Palestinian dead bodies are checking to see if foreign media have finished taking photos, some bodies are feeling suffocated
Seriously journos need to give them a break
😅 pic.twitter.com/LqmGAL0qJ2— Yana Mir (@MirYanaSY) May 16, 2021
The video is viral on Facebook. Alt News also received verification requests on its official WhatsApp number (7600011160).
Fact-check
Alt News broke the video into multiple keyframes using the digital verification tool InVid. Upon reverse searching one of the keyframes, we found the same video posted by the YouTube channel ‘Elbadil newspaper’ on October 28, 2013. The title of the video reads, “A representative show of bodies inside Al-Azhar University”. Another YouTube channel – ‘Akhbar El Yom Tv‘ – also posted the video on October 28, 2013.
On the basis of the YouTube videos, we performed a keyword search in Arabic and found that the video is indeed from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University. The students were demonstrating against police and army by posing as corpses.
This is not the first time this video was shared with a false narrative. In March 2014, the Egyptian channel El Balad TV had linked the video with the 2013 Rabaa massacre.
The video was falsely shared as a chemical attack in Syria and Palestine in 2018. It frequently goes viral in Egypt as well. International news agency AFP had debunked the video in April 2021 when it went viral in Egypt with a different misleading claim.
Moreover, Syrian fact-checking agency Verify-sy, Dogrula.org, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab, and Arabic fact-checking organization Misbar have also published reports fact-checking the video.
Therefore, a video from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University where students protested against police and army by posing as dead bodies in 2013 is viral as Palestinians faking deaths.
