Israel-Palestine war: Unrelated, old clips shared as visuals of ongoing conflict

by Abhishek Kumar

Entering its fifth day on October 11, the Israel-Palestine conflict all but escalated into a full-blown war with the Israeli military confirming that dozens of its fighter jets had struck more than 200 targets overnight in a neighbourhood of Gaza City even as Hamas fighters rampaged through parts of southern Israel, in the deadliest Palestinian attack in Israel’s history. The combined toll on both sides crossed 3,500, according to reports.

Against this backdrop, several videos are being circulated on social media as depicting the violence in the ongoing conflict. In this article, Alt News will investigate five such viral videos one by one.

Claim 1

The first example comes from Ashlea Simon, the chairperson of the Right-Wing British political party Britain First. In the footage she shared, fighter jets were seen being carried on trucks and a roadside signboard saying ‘Ar’ara Ba Negev and Arad’. It has been claimed that the Israeli Defense Forces had begun evacuating airports near Gaza due to thousands of terrorists entering Israel. (Archived link)

Fact Check

Alt News performed a reverse image search of frames taken from the video on Google. We found this video in a tweet dated September 15 of this year. A second user had also tweeted the same footage on September 13. This confirms that the video had been posted online before the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, which started on October 7.

Claim II

In this video, several paratroopers can be seen descending on a stately building in a city. It is claimed that these are Palestinian fighters landing into Israeli territory with the help of parachutes. Linking it to the recent Israel-Palestine violence, far-Right YouTuber Jackson Hinkle wondered what the consequences would be if the situation escalated into a full-blown Arab conflict, if this much damage had already been done by a few “motorised paragliders and moped militias”.

Fact Check

We performed a reverse image search using a screenshot of the building shown in the viral video with the help of Google Lens. We discovered that this is the building of the Egyptian Military Academy. We also found the logo of the Egyptian Military Academy, which matches the logo seen outside the building in the footage.

Based on the information we found here, Alt News examined the official websites of the Egyptian Military Academy. Here we found a higher resolution picture of this academy which matches the viral video exactly. In other words, this video is not from Israel, but from Egypt.

Claim III

This video features a man sitting and a little girl, who, users claim, is a kidnapped Jew from Gaza, standing next to her Hamas terrorist captor. Pakistan-origin user Faraz Parvaiz tweeted this video with the same claim.

Fact Check

We noticed a TikTok watermark on the video with the username @izzeddin_masama. Since TikTok is banned in India, we searched for the account on TikTok with the help of a VPN and found that this account had either been deleted or deactivated. To gather more information about the video, we performed a keyword search on Twitter. This led us to a reply from a user, who termed the claim made with the viral video as fake and said that it was a month old. The post also contained a TikTok link.

When we clicked this link, it led us to the same video by @izzeddin_masama which has now been deleted. When we searched for the cached version of the link, we discovered that the same video was being shared in connection with the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. We looked at the source code of this web page. This video was uploaded on September 8 of this year. This means that it was made before the conflict began on October 7, and is not related to the ongoing conflict.

Claim IV

In this video, fireworks can be seen all over a city skyline. While sharing this, users are claiming that fireworks were being set off in Gaza after Israel launched air strikes on the locations of Hamas terrorists.

Fact Check

This video also has a watermark of a TikTok username (@ramiguerfi41). When we searched this account with the help of a VPN, we did not find this video on this account. After performing a reverse image search using frames from the video on Google, we found another tweet which made a similar claim carrying the video. Several users had replied to the tweet, commenting that this video was old. We also found a reply containing the link to the TikTok account with the username seen in the viral video. We checked this link and found that the video had been deleted.

When we accessed the cached version of the video link on Google’s search engine, we found that this was the same video which was being shared in connection with the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. When we looked at the source code of this web page, we found that this video was uploaded on September 28 of this year, days before the Hamas attack on Israel. In other words, the video can not be related to the present conflict.

Claim V

Journalist Sulaiman Ahmed, associated with The Round Table Show, tweeted a video depicting a building getting destroyed after being blown up in an airstrike, linking it to the current conflict between Israel and Palestine. Along with this video, he gave an update on Twitter that 161 people had been killed and 931 had been injured as a result of the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. Many other users are sharing this video by linking it to the recent conflict.

Fact Check

When Alt News performed a reverse image search using frames from the video on Google, we found it in a tweet by former Palestinian authority spokesperson and political analyst Nour Odeh dated May 13. Therefore, this video is also old and not from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.

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About the Author

Abhishek is a senior fact-checking journalist and researcher at Alt News. He has a keen interest in information verification and technology. He is always eager to learn new skills, explore new OSINT tools and techniques. Prior to joining Alt News, he worked in the field of content development and analysis with a major focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).