Thousands of civilians have been killed on both sides of the bloody war triggered when Hamas gunmen launched an unprecedented attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7. The conflict has sparked a surge in misinformation, including false accusations that deaths and injuries have been faked. In one example, an old video resurfaced in Facebook posts saying it shows Palestinians staging a funeral. The footage has in fact circulated in reports from March 2020 about a group of young people trying to break Covid-19 restrictions in Jordan.
“Hamas group parades a child’s corpse to fool the world,” reads the Thai-language caption to the video shared on TikTok on October 13.
The video, which received more than 25,000 likes and was shared over 3,200 times, shows people appearing to carry a shrouded body on a stretcher. Sirens suddenly blare out and the people dump the stretcher and leave.
The person on the stretcher is seen getting up and running away.
The video spread on social media in multiple languages, including French and Greek, alongside a similar false claim it shows a fake funeral.
Misinformation around the Israel-Hamas war has skyrocketed since the conflict began, with various social media posts falsely purporting to show evidence of “crisis actors” or people faking injuries.
Hamas militants stormed across the border from Gaza into Israel on October 7, killing more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages, Israeli officials say.
According to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, the retaliatory Israeli military campaign has killed more than 10,800 people, many of them children.
Covid stunt
AFP found the clip of people apparently carrying a body on a stretcher in a YouTube video from 2020 that said it was filmed in Jordan.
A reverse image search on Russian search engine Yandex found the YouTube video with the Arabic title “Funny things from the third day of curfew in Jordan”. It was posted on March 24, 2020 (archived link).
Below is a screenshot of the video shared in posts falsely linking it to the Israel-Hamas war (left) and the YouTube video from 2020 (right):
The video was also posted on YouTube on March 26, 2020 by Arabic-language TV channel Orient News, which said it showed a “fake funeral in Jordan to break the curfew” (archived link).
The incident was also reported by the UAE-based news organisation Al Roeya on March 24, 2020 (archived link).
The article reads in part: “It later became clear that a group of young people were trying to break the ban imposed by the Jordanian authorities for fear of the spread of the coronavirus.”
Additionally, Roya News, an English-language media outlet that covers Jordan, posted the video on its Facebook page on March 24, 2020 (archived link).
The news agency also shared an article reporting the arrest of hundreds of citizens who had violated restrictive measures in Jordan (archived link).
This is not the first time this video has been shared out of context with a false claim that links to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. AFP previously debunked the same video in 2021 and published a report here.
COVID-19, Fact Check, Israel-Hamas Conflict
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Originally published here.
