Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Old footage showing 'salvo of rockets’ misattributed to 2023 Hamas attack on Israel

  • This article is more than one year old.
  • Published on October 13, 2023 at 09:29
  • Updated on October 20, 2023 at 14:46
  • 2 min read
  • By AFP Brazil, AFP Kenya
  • Translation and adaptation James OKONG'O

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Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel in early October 2023. Israel retaliated, resulting in a war claiming thousands of lives on both sides. Amid the conflict, posts on social media shared a clip claiming to show Hamas firing missiles toward Israel at night. This is false; the original footage predates the current clashes and was filmed during the conflict between Turkey and Syria in 2020.

“Salvo of rockets fired by #Hamas from the #Gaza Strip towards #Israel,” reads a post published in Nigeria on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Screenshot showing the false post, taken on October 12, 2023

The post, published on October 9, 2023, includes a clip of numerous missiles being fired from an open field at night.

The footage was also shared with the same claim on Instagram in Nigeria.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas carried out one of its most significant attacks on Israel in years, killing more than 1,200 people and taking at least 150 others hostage (archived here).

Hamas governs the densely-populated Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip.

The surprise incursion, which saw Hamas gunmen breaching security barriers beneath a barrage of rockets fired from Gaza, was launched at dawn on October 7, 2023 (archived here).

Israel has retaliated by dropping 6,000 bombs on Gaza (archive here). More than 1,350 Gazans have been killed in the bombardment and another 6,000 injured. Israel has also cut off supplies of water, electricity and food to the population of 2.3 million.

However, the clip does not show Hamas militants firing missiles from Gaza into Israel.

Turkish barrage

AFP Fact Check first debunked the claim in Portuguese and found that the footage had nothing to do with Israel (archived here).

Using a reverse image search on a screenshot from the video, we found the clip was first online in February 2020.

Turkish newspaper The Daily Sabah published the video on X on February 3, 2020. According to the newspaper, the footage shows Turkish forces retaliating against Syrian attacks in Idlib province (archived here).

On the same day, the Turkish language news website Ensonhaber also published the clip on X (archived here) with a caption reading: “The moment Turkish troops fired rockets at Syrian soldiers in Idlib.”

At the time, AFP reported that Turkish and Syrian troops had clashed in Syria’s northwest provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. Throughout the Syrian civil war, Turkey has backed rebel factions in the country (archived here).

AFP Fact Check was unable to verify the precise spot where the rockets in the video were fired from.

The renewed conflict between Israel and Palestine has generated a wave of misinformation online. You can follow our coverage here.

October 20, 2023 Updated to clarify there is no evidence to show where exactly the rockets were launched from

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